Protecting Marie (15 page)

V
acation ended for Fanny, but classes at the university weren't to resume for another three weeks, so while Fanny was at Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School and Ellen was at work, Henry and Dinner were alone in the house. Thoughts of what might be happening while she was away from home plagued Fanny throughout the day. She had ragged nails and a new habit of sucking on her knuckles to prove
it. When the final bell would ring, Fanny would gather her things and race home. Sometimes she waited for Mary; sometimes she didn't. Usually, Dinner was in the backyard, content, squirrels and birds occupying her complete attention, or fast asleep on her afghan by the radiator in the living room. (Fanny brought the afghan down from her bedroom each morning and created a comfortable nest for Dinner.) Their joyful reunion at a quarter past three was a radiant point in Fanny's day.

Often, Henry had a complaint or two to register in a sharp voice:
There is dog hair everywhere. An abundance. Pinches of it like snowflakes. Enough to make a sweater. You know where the vacuum cleaner is kept. After a new snowfall, it's as if the yard were filled with land mines. Here's the trowel. I don't want to have to be reminding you of your responsibilities. She knocked a wineglass off the coffee table with her tail today. I just thought you should know.

When there were no complaints, it seemed
to Fanny that Henry was pleased with how his day had turned out in respect to his painting. “I may be on to something,” he said one afternoon. But just when Fanny would feel relaxed about Dinner's future with her father, Henry would become more formidable and touchy than ever.

So Fanny became vigilant. In a manner similar to that with which she had protected Marie, Fanny began protecting Dinner. She set her alarm clock ten minutes earlier each morning to pick up turds in the yard before school. She moved Dinner's food and water dishes into the back hall, completely out of harm's way. She vacuumed without being told, not only the rugs and floors, but the stairs, radiators, and the bottom edge of the drapes as well. She anticipated the movement of Dinner's tail, watching Henry's wineglass on the coffee table before supper the way a new mother watches her infant, lurching forward at even the subtle suggestion of danger. On the Saturday after school had started again, she noticed wispy bullets of Dinner's hair on the
bricks in the fireplace, and so she cleaned the fireplace entirely. I'm Cinderella, she thought as she swept the ashes. Fanny realized that a big, living, breathing dog is much harder to protect than a handmade paper doll that can be cradled in your hands or folded and concealed in a grown-up fist.

The weather kept changing. One day, the sky would be the color of lead, the next day, it would be forget-me-not blue, and following that, it might snow so hard that you wouldn't be able to see the sky. The wind would howl, the wind would stop. Cloudy, sunny, gloomy, bright, chilly, frigid, dry, damp. It occurred to Fanny that her father's moods were like the weather.

After it had been sunny for a couple of days, the snow on the roof melted and slender icicles formed along the gutter like the fringe on Henry and Ellen's bedspread. At the corner of the house, up high, where the downspout joined the gutter, a huge cluster of icicles hung. The gutter was overflowing with it. The cluster was weighty and multipointed, and it
looked as though this isolated section of the house were wearing a majestic beard.

With the roof clear, Henry showed Fanny how to throw a tennis ball onto the roof so that it bounced down onto the lower roof above the screened back porch and then landed in the yard, to Dinner's great delight. After a few throws, Dinner caught the ball in midair nearly every time. Henry had come up with the idea that morning, he told Fanny, to avoid painting.

Fanny tried it. She had a good arm, and since Dinner had been with them it had grown stronger from playing fetch so often. On her first attempt, Fanny hit the bathroom window, but she readily got the hang of it.

“This is fun,” she said gleefully.

Fanny continued to play after Henry had gone back inside the house.

It soon became a favorite game of Fanny and Dinner's, a daily activity as long as the roof was free of snow. Fanny even thought of a name for it—she called it roofball. “In the summer we can play it all day long,” she told
Dinner. Fanny held Dinner's ears up and made them dance.

One slushy afternoon, Fanny and Dinner's game of roofball was cut short. Within five minutes after they had begun playing, the back door sprung open, Henry's head appeared, and his voice sounded forth. “Please stop that. I can't concentrate.” The door closed definitively like a period after his words.

Fanny curled her lip. “You taught it to me,” she whispered, astonished. Impulsively, she threw the ball one last time. As hard as she could. It hit the chimney with a thud—directly where the chimney met the roof—and then rolled sluggishly into the gutter above the bathroom window. Oh, great, she thought. She was afraid to tell her father. Dinner ran back and forth along the edge of the house, her head held high, waiting for the ball to fall.

Days passed and the ball just sat there, hidden. Although Fanny kept many tennis balls as backups because Dinner occasionally lost them in the woods (she stored them in a canvas bag in her closet), she didn't dare take the
chance of getting another one stuck in the gutter or ruining Henry's concentration. And that was the end of roofball.

Fanny couldn't fall asleep. It was a cold, noisy January night. The harder she tried, the more impossible the prospect became. She was so very close to sleep once, but the house cracked in the harsh winter air and her drowsiness quickly unraveled. She was wide awake again. Even her fan didn't help.

Dinner breathed like a horse and sighed like an elephant. Cars traveled by, two streets over. People arrived home and slammed their car doors. Keys turned in locks. Depending on how her head was angled on her pillow, Fanny could hear her blood flow. It seemed as though the whole world were spinning in the place where her brain was supposed to be.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

Her train of thought jumped with suddenness from one thing to another. From Dinner to Henry to Red Cap to Mary to Marie to Ellen to Nellie to Stuart Walker to the Snow
Queen to Mary's young parents to old Mrs. Wagner and her hollyhocks to ice skates to the tennis ball stuck in the gutter.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

She wiggled her fingers directly in front of her eyes, staring at them for so long that they no longer looked like fingers. In the darkened room, they looked like ugly little things, nimble sea creatures that weren't a part of her. Restlessly, she moved from her stomach to her side to her back, wondering if lying on her stomach would keep her breasts from developing.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

She closed her eyes and imagined skating a figure eight. Her eyes moved up, around, over, down, up, around, over, down. Was a figure eight, lying down, a symbol for infinity or eternity? She couldn't remember.

Eternity infinity, eternity infinity, eternity infinity.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

That night, Fanny coined a new word, her word, a combination of eternity and infinity:
internity. Internity was her name for the time of night when even the softest noise is loud, when you want to sleep and you can't, when your mind is racing and it won't stop, and it feels as though morning will never come.

Internity internity internity.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

There was only one thing to do. Fanny crept over to Dinner's bed. Dinner stirred; she licked Fanny's face. Fanny reached for her comforter from the foot of her bed and dragged it along the floor. She wrapped herself snugly and curled around her dog, her right arm circling Dinner and her left arm resting diagonally across Dinner's chest. Her right hand cupped the crown of Dinner's head and her left hand was tucked between Dinner's leg and belly. With her tags jingling, Dinner gave Fanny one last lick out of the side of her mouth. The holey, dove-colored afghan was warm and smelled so good to Fanny, so unlike her own bed, like the earth. Trying to match her breathing with Dinner's, Fanny shut her eyes.

Sleep, sleep, please fall asleep.

Internity finally ended. Fanny finally fell asleep.

School was over for the day and Fanny was running late. After her last class, she walked swiftly to the library, darting in and out among the students, clutching her books to her chest, twisting this way and that way to get through the crowd without knocking into anyone. In the library near the checkout desk, the most massive dictionary Fanny had ever seen lay open. It was even thicker than the maroon leather-bound dictionary that her parents kept in the den. Fanny searched for her word. Internity. She located the page where it should have appeared; the entries jumped from internist to internment, just like the dictionary at home. Good, she thought smugly, it really, truly is my own word.

At her locker, she decided which books to bring home, loaded her backpack, and threw on her coat. She paused, looking into the small, dim rectangular cave, wondering how
one goes about getting a word known to many people, how one gets a word into a dictionary. For now, she would keep it to herself. A photograph of Dinner was taped to the inside of her locker door. The photograph, taken on Christmas morning, showed Dinner sporting a loopy green bow from a present, her tongue lolling. It reminded Fanny to hurry up, to get home to see what Dinner and Henry were doing.

Because the locker door was still open, Fanny didn't see him at first. When she slammed it shut, he startled her.

It was a boy she barely knew. A big-eared, spindly boy with mussed hair. A boy named Timothy Hill.

He didn't say anything, so Fanny whispered, “Hi.”

“Hi,” he answered shyly.

Fanny's expression conveyed what she was thinking: What do you want?

The boy's hands were jammed deeply into his coat pockets. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, watching the ribbons of dirty wa
ter on the floor and only stealing peeks at Fanny. “I, uh, don't know if you know, but my name is Timothy Hill,” he said slowly and quietly.

“I know.”

“And you're Fanny Swann,” he said. “Dumb,” he added in a whisper, rolling his eyes, obviously embarrassed by his remark.

Fanny started walking down the long hallway. She needed to get home.

Timothy Hill shuffled along sideways to keep up. “I have something of yours,” he told her.

Fanny stopped. “What?”

“I found it on Christmas morning. In my backyard, caught in a bittersweet bush.” Timothy Hill pulled a crumpled piece of paper, some string, and a deflated balloon out of his pocket.

Fanny gasped. “Give me that,” she said. It was the note she had written and released in the middle of the night, the night her father had stayed away. She snatched the note, string, and balloon from his hand. “Did you
read it?” she asked. “Of course you read it.”

Timothy Hill nodded.

“It's none of your business, you know,” she said, fully aware that it wasn't his fault at all that this had happened, but hers. She unfolded the note and reread it.
At this very moment I don't understand my father and would like a new one. If you're interested, please reply.
Her initials were there, plain as could be, and so was her address. “It was a joke, anyway. I didn't really mean it. About my father.” Of course she had meant it, but it was a matter of privacy that concerned her now. Oh, how she regretted what she had done. What good could possibly have come from sending a silly, impulsive message off by way of a balloon? “So how did you know F. S. was me?”

Timothy Hill blushed vividly. His cheeks were bright pink. “It was kind of like an adventure. I walked by the address on the paper and I saw you on your porch. That's when I knew you were F. S. I even checked on you a couple of times, you know, because of what the note said. I saw you playing with a dog
and you seemed happy, and I saw you skating with two people who I think were your parents and you were all laughing, so I figured you were okay. But if—”

“You can't tell anyone about this,” Fanny instructed urgently, trying her best to sound forceful.

“I won't.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Now you have to tell me something about you,” she insisted. “Something that you don't want anyone to know.”

Timothy Hill shrugged and blushed again. His face puckered. Fanny almost thought that she could hear him pondering this, wheels turning and turning in his head, synapses firing. Seconds passed like minutes before he reached into his backpack and lovingly drew out a red knitted cap. The cap had a long braid with a tassel at the end and earflaps decorated with white snowflakes. “I knit,” he said. “I made this.”

Muscles twitched in Fanny's neck, and she
felt a tickle at the back of her throat. “
You,”
she said loudly. “
You're
Red Cap.”

Timothy Hill looked completely confused. “I don't wear it around school. I'd probably get teased. My older brother calls me Baby Hat when I wear it.”

“You don't want to take my dog. You don't even
know
my dog.” Fanny's voice cracked. “Thank you. Oh, thank you.” She took a deep breath. “I've got to run,” she said in parting.

Bewildered, Timothy Hill was left in the middle of the hallway, holding his hat tightly in both hands. “But . . . wait . . .”

“It's a long story,” Fanny called back over her shoulder. “Maybe I'll tell you someday!”

If she were Mary Dibble, she would have been shrieking with joy the entire way home. But she was Fanny Swann, and so she held her joy deep inside her like a secret that crept out in a constant smile, a smile that burst across her face from ear to ear.