Penpal (7 page)

I’m not sure how the routine was born, but The Ditch had become a battleground to Josh and me. Nearly every time we stepped into The Ditch, one of us would lob a clod of dirt at the other, and this would catalyze a full-scale assault in both directions. It probably started with a single, playful toss of a dried mass of compacted dirt, but it became nearly impossible for us to step into that arena without almost instantly entering into a standoff. We enjoyed these battles so much and sought them out with such frequency that “that ditch” became “The Ditch” without us ever noticing. That day was no exception to the rule of combat, but the war game was persistently interrupted by rustling in the woods around us.

We were used to these sounds; there were raccoons and stray cats that lived in the woods by my house, but there seemed to be a little too much noise coming from the forest floor for it to be caused by either of those things. As we continued our battle, we traded guesses at what the source of the ruckus was in an attempt to scare one another – playing games like these gradually evolved into the games I would play by myself when exiting the woods as the sun rolled away.

My last guess was that it was a mummy, but in the end Josh kept insisting that it was a robot because of the sounds that we heard. As we were leaving, I said that if it was a robot, it would have made much more noise, but Josh shook this off and became a little serious. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “You heard it, didn’t you? It sounded like a robot. You heard it too, right?” I had heard it, and since it sounded mechanical, I agreed that it was probably a robot.

It’s only now, looking back, that I understand what we heard.

When we got back to my house, Josh’s mom was waiting for him at the dining room table with my mom. Josh told his mom about the robot, our moms laughed, and Josh went home. My mom and I ate dinner, and then I went to bed.

I tried to sleep, but I was feeling restless. Josh might not have been interested in the photos, but after seeing that dollar, I could think of virtually nothing else. Before too long, I climbed down from the top bunk and took the box of envelopes out of my dresser drawer. I took out the first envelope, set it on the floor, and placed the blurry desert Polaroid that had been inside of it on top. I laid the second envelope right next to it and put the oddly angled Polaroid of a building’s top corner over it. I did this with each picture until they formed a grid that was about 5 x 10; I was taught to always be careful with the things that I was collecting, even if I wasn’t sure whether they were valuable or not.

I realized that I hadn’t actually looked at the majority of these pictures before. I may have paid them a passing glance when I opened the envelope to look for a letter, but upon being reliably disappointed, I would simply close the envelope and put it with the others. As I looked at them now, I noticed that the pictures gradually became more distinct. I scanned my eyes over the Polaroids.

There was a tree with a bird on it, a speed limit sign, a power line, a group of people walking into some building … Right as my eyes were about to move onto the next photo in the sequence, they froze and focused on something that vexed me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only a single, repeating thought.

Why am I in this picture?

In the photograph of the group of people entering the building, I saw myself holding hands with my mother in the very back of the crowd of people. We were at the very edge of the photo, but it was us. As my eyes swam over the sea of Polaroids, I became increasingly anxious. It was a really odd feeling. It wasn’t fear; it was the feeling you get when you are in trouble. I’m not sure why I was flooded with that feeling, but there I sat, floundering in the distinct sense that I had done something wrong. This feeling only intensified as I finally managed to break my gaze and look at the rest of the pictures.

I was in
every
photo.

None of them were close shots. None of them were only of me. But I was in every single one of them – off to the side, in the back of a group, at the bottom of the frame. Some of the pictures had only the tiniest part of my face captured at the very edge of the photo, but nevertheless, I was there. I was always there.

For a moment, I tried to imagine this whole thing as one tremendous coincidence, but I knew that it wasn’t, and I sat there stunned. I didn’t know what to do. Your mind works in funny ways as a kid; there was a large part of me that was afraid of getting in trouble simply for still being awake. I wanted to wake up my mother. I wanted to tell her that there was something wrong here. I wanted to run into her bedroom and throw the pictures onto her comforter and just shout “Look!” and have her hug me and tell me that everything was going to be fine – that I had nothing to be afraid of. But I just sat there with the looming feeling of having made some irreparable transgression. I decided that I would wait until the morning.

The next day, my mom was off work and spent most of the morning cleaning up around the house. I stared blankly at the cartoons on the television and waited until I thought it was a good time to show her the Polaroids. When she went out to get the mail, I grabbed a couple of the pictures and put them on the table in front of me; I sat waiting for her to come back in.
I couldn’t
even think of how to begin, and I dug my
fingernails into
the chipping paint on the table as I tried desperately to think of the perfect way to explain everything. When she returned, she was already opening the mail. I heard her throw some junk mail into the trashcan, and I took a deep breath and forced words out of my mouth.

“Mom, can you come here? I … I have these pictures—”

“Just give me a minute, honey. I need to mark these on the calendar.”

After a moment, she came and stood behind me and asked me what I needed. I could hear her shuffling with the mail, but I just looked at the Polaroids and told her about them. I reminded her about the Balloon Project and how I had only gotten a picture in my first correspondence. I told her that after that one they just kept coming, but I never said anything because they were just stupid pictures. I dug my fingernails harder into the table and told her that I had saved them all and had gotten so excited when the dollar came back that I stayed up late looking at all the photos.

As I went on in my explanation and pointed to the pictures, her frequent “uh-huh’s” and “okay’s” decreased, and she was suddenly completely quiet and making only a little noise with the mail. I had run out of things to say, but I couldn’t turn around and face her. I waited for her to say something, but the next noise I heard from her sounded as if she were trying to catch her breath in a room that had no air left in it. At last, she subdued her struggling gasps and simply dropped the remaining mail on the table right next to me and ran to the kitchen to get the cordless phone.

“Mom! I’m sorry, I didn’t know about these! Don’t be mad at me!”

With the phone pressed to her ear, she was alternating running and walking back and forth while shouting into the mouthpiece. I couldn’t understand what she was saying or who she could be calling. Was it my teacher? No, this wasn’t her fault. I nervously fiddled with the mail that was sitting next to the Polaroids I had arranged. The top envelope had something sticking out of it that I thoughtlessly and anxiously pulled on until it came out.

It was another Polaroid.

Confused, I thought that somehow one of my Polaroids had slipped into the stack when she threw the mail down, but when I turned it over and looked at it, I realized that I had not seen this one before. It was me, but this one was a much closer shot. I was surrounded by trees and was smiling. But it wasn’t just me. Josh was there too. I felt my mouth go dry as I realized that this was us from yesterday.

I started yelling for my mom who was still screaming into the phone. As I called to her more loudly, she shouted more loudly into the phone to compensate, and this exchange repeated until she finally responded with “What?!”

Suddenly, I had her attention, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I could only think to ask, “Who are you calling?”

“I’m talking with the police, honey.”

“But why? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do anything …
please mom!”

She answered me with a response that I never understood until I was forced to revisit these events from the earliest years of my life. She grabbed the envelope off the table, and the picture of Josh and I spun and slid, landing next to the other
Polaroids in
front of me. She held the front of the envelope up to my eyes, but I could only look at her and watch as all the color began draining out of her face, as if something was siphoning the life right out of her. With tears welling up in her eyes, she said that she had to call the police because there was no postmark.

Boxes

I spent the summer before kindergarten learning how to climb trees. There was an abundance of trees in my neighborhood, but there was one particular pine tree right outside my house that seemed almost designed for me. It had branches that were so low I could grab them easily without a boost, and for the first couple of days after I learned how to pull myself up, I would just sit on the lowest branch, dangling my feet.

The tree was outside our back fence and was easily visible from the living room of our house. Before too long, and without explicitly discussing that this would be the arrangement, my mother and I developed a routine where I would go play on the tree when she would watch her TV shows, since she could easily see me while she did other things. This was unlike our trips to the YMCA pool where I would insist that she watch every moment of my amazing ability to keep my head under water – sometimes for up to ten minutes; she never seemed that impressed, though I think it was because I was breathing the entire time through a snorkel.

As the summer passed, my abilities grew. Dangling my feet while sitting on a branch quickly lost its appeal, so I had begun to move up the branches, and before too long, I was climbing fairly high. As I climbed farther up the tree, I discovered that its branches not only got thinner but also more widely spaced, and so eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t actually climb any higher. This meant that the game had to change; I began to concentrate on speed, and in the end, I could reach my highest branch in twenty-five seconds.

In my mind, I was quite a skilled climber, but my expertise was specialized. I only ever climbed that particular tree, and I always took the same path – I had worn off the bark on some of the branches from the grinding of my shoes and the wringing of my hands as I moved from one branch to another in the same, familiar path.

I got too confident, and one afternoon I tried to step from a branch before I had firmly grasped the next one. I fell about twenty feet, and when I hit the earth, all the air was violently pushed out of my lungs. Dazed, I attempted to get up, but as I put more weight on my left arm, it failed me, and I fell back to the ground. When I looked at the arm that had betrayed me, I understood that I had simply asked too much of it; my forearm was twisted and bent like my tree’s roots, and when I tried to move my fingers, I found that they either all moved together or not at all.

My mom was running toward me yelling something, and I remember her sounding like she was underwater – I don’t recall what she said, but I do remember being surprised by just how white my bone was.

I couldn’t climb trees any more after that.

I was going to start kindergarten with a cast and wouldn’t even have any friends to sign it. My mother and I had put a great deal of preparation into making my first day of school a success, but we weren’t prepared for this. She must have felt terrible, because the day before I started school, she brought home a kitten. He was just a baby and was striped with tan and white; and he was a talker – the soundtrack of my excitement was a never-ending series of short but continuous cries.

The cat squirmed a little in my mom’s arms and fanned his toes as he extended his legs. She kissed him on the head and bent toward the floor to release him. As soon as she put him down, he crawled into an empty case of soda that was sitting on the floor. I named him Boxes.

Boxes was only an outside cat when he escaped. Some time long before I was born, my mom had a cat that had apparently decimated the furniture. In the interest of having both a cat and places to sit, my mom had Boxes declawed. As a result, we did our best to keep him inside. Despite our best efforts, he would still escape every now and then, and we’d find him somewhere in the backyard chasing some kind of bug or lizard.

Most of the time his prey would simply elude him the old-fashioned way, but there were a couple times when I approached Boxes in the backyard and saw that he had pinned some poor, small animal. But without fail, the tiny creature would pull itself forward and slide through Boxes’ clawless paws, and he would watch in horrified disbelief as his prize literally slipped through his fingers.

Boxes could sometimes be as evasive as the lizards he stalked, but we’d always catch him and carry him back inside. He’d scramble to look back over my shoulder, meowing the whole way – I told my mom that it was because he was planning his strategy for next time and warning the lizards that he’d be back. Once we were back inside, we’d give him some tuna fish.

Partly due to this ritual, Boxes learned what the sound of the electric can-opener might signal, and he would come running whenever he heard it. Most of the time my mother wasn’t opening cans of tuna, but Boxes would howl until she put the can on the ground for him. He would smell it and then look up at her in disgust, as if he was thinking, “What is this?
Soup
?”