Seeing Things (4 page)

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Authors: Patti Hill

BOOK: Seeing Things
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Bee jumped from the bed to bark at the door, her tail thumping the nightstand like a drum. A quick rap of knuckles and the door opened. The cuff of a sweatshirt. A book bag. Fletcher! A book landed in my lap, and I reached for a magnifying glass.
“It's
Huck Finn,
” Fletcher said, breathy.
“Won't you need—?”
“No lit today. Assembly.” The door clicked shut. Fletcher's tennis shoes squeaked across the wooden floor toward the front door. The house shuddered when he slammed the door.
Lord, help him to fly low today.
Bee stood at the glass door that led to the patio, and beyond, the lawn, her dumping ground so to speak. “Just a minute,” I said, surprised by the irritation in my voice. But why shouldn't I be grumpy? It took over an hour to get out of bed, showered, and dressed. Stupid ankle. Getting ready for my wedding didn't take that long.
Bee pawed at the door.
I reviewed the steps of getting out of bed: Roll onto side. Push slowly with arms into a sitting position. Wait for blood to redistribute through my body, especially the brain. Despite my best efforts to focus on the task at hand, the usual inventory played like a litany: Back aches. Neck aches. Calves ache. Shoulder complains. Broken ankle feels perfectly fine. I felt a hundred years old, and I didn't know what day it was, except that I'd been getting out of bed per the physical therapist's instructions for about a week. I counted back to the day I fell.
“This must be Friday. What say you to that, Bee? We should be hiking with Josie today. Lots of fat bunnies live along the Ruby Canyon trail. The creek will be flowing. How does a stop at the Red Rock Grille sound? You know I'd share my hamburger with you.”
Bee wasn't listening. She whined at the door. The beat of her tail against the recliner intensified.
“I hear you, you troublesome bag of bones.” I slipped the hospital-issued, skid-proof slipper onto my good foot. I'd come to terms with the walker. Without the contraption, I was limited to walking where I could support myself with furniture or counters. Much to my chagrin, the walker provided the little freedom I enjoyed, so I arranged the walker in front of me and hefted myself to standing. I hop scooted to the door. “You're not covering that door with snot art, are you? Lupe doesn't appreciate your artistic talent.” I opened the door and prepared for the thwack of her tail against my leg as she exited, but her tail hit the walker instead. “Hey, I could get used to this.”
I pressed the button on top of the alarm clock. The metallic voice said, “Seven-oh-three a.m.”
“I'm getting lazy.”
At home I welcomed the coming of morning. I left Bee in bed and felt my way downstairs to coax a flame out of the stove before adding a log. While the coffee brewed, I stepped onto the porch for a jolt of the bristling cold. Before the birds started their chattering from their roosts in the piñons, the cold, like a snap of a wet towel, shocked all the aches and pains right out of me and hailed me back to a time when I'd walked into the burgeoning morning with Chuck, his lunch and thermos in hand. In the early years at Yellowstone, he leaned down from his horse, Samson, to kiss me good-bye. In the Everglades, I shone a flashlight under his truck to make sure an alligator or snake hadn't spent the night under the muffler. Most mornings on the Olympic Peninsula we kissed with mist-dampened faces. Although I can't conjure his face, I can still taste our good-bye kiss—bitter with coffee but oh so warm.
TO SAY DENVER'S SPRING weather is fickle is like saying Napoleon possessed minor ambitions. Spring came to the Front Range like a lamb, then a lion, then a lamb again, and then like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Today the sun was a friend's caress, comforting and familiar. The bright sunshine provided the best possible situation for me to read, so I coaxed Lupe into dragging a chaise lounge to the middle of the lawn. I lifted my face to the sun to encourage liver spots and wrinkles to multiply as they may.
I focused my magnifying glass on the pages of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and read. Shifting the glass around the page slowed my progress, but Huck hooked me with his keen eye for hypocrisy and his careless naiveté. I laughed out loud, which was more of a snort I'm afraid, when he told Miss Watson he wished he were in the bad place because it appealed to his sense of adventure, whereas sitting on a cloud playing a harp did not. As for me, I believed God created us for purposes that crossed time into eternity. When I anticipated the Father finding worth in my lackluster talents to serve the purposes of eternity, goose bumps rose on my arms. Maybe I would bake pies for the wedding feast. For sure, I would need a bigger oven.
I stopped daydreaming to return to the story. Flecks of ash floated across the page. Odd. I scanned the sky for a telltale column of smoke. Surely a fire burned nearby. The sky was a baby-boy blanket, soft and pale. I shrugged, the mystery of ashes less interesting than Huck's adventures, and returned to the book. The magnifying glass revealed a charred hole in the pages.
I'd gone and burned a hole in Fletcher's book.
I snuffed out the smoke with the hem of my sleeve. “Oh, for heaven's sake!” Bee barked, thinking I'd started a tug-of-war game with my sweatshirt. “Shush up, now. I have a situation here.” My pinkie slid through the blackened edges of twenty pages or more.
I SAT AT THE kitchen counter with Fletcher, finishing an eclectic selection of
dim sum
from the Snappy Dragon restaurant, Fletcher's choice, and the food was indeed snappy. Wads of spent napkins cluttered the countertop.
I dabbed my forehead. “If they charge you for the
Huck
book, I'm paying. Should I write a note to your teacher?”
“It's no big deal, Grandma,” he said and popped a dumpling of sorts into his mouth. “I'll download the story onto my iPod. It'll be easier for you to listen anyway.”
An iPod sounded beyond my technological abilities, but for now I beckoned Fletcher to push the dipping sauce my direction and talked around the pot sticker in my cheek. “Back home we have to drive two hours to get Chinese food worth eating. This is wonderful!”
“There's one more shrimp and scallop
shu mai
left. You really should try it. The mango sauce rocks.”
I'd given up seafood after eating spoiled sea bass on a Mexican Riviera cruise. “Nah, it's your favorite. Take it.”
“Dad says you didn't let him leave the table without tasting everything.”
“I was a coldhearted mother, and I've regretted being so every day of my life.”
“
Dim sum
means ‘to touch your heart' in Chinese. This mango sauce will definitely warm your cold, cold heart.” He tipped the gaping take-out carton toward me. “Just one, Grandma.”
My own grandson taunted me with the same ruthlessness I'd used to cow Josie into trying a spicy jellyfish salad in Thailand. But Fletcher said my name with such affection, I stabbed at the shu mai with a fork and swirled it in the mango sauce, knowing I'd live to regret my extravagance.
My tongue burned. My nose ran. A tear escaped each eye.
“I like it,” I said.
Chapter 5
I woke with a branding iron searing through my back to my ribs. Heartburn. A little belch and the shu mai received full credit for ruining my sleep. The motor that raised the head of the bed moaned, and so did I. Bee, caught in the valley between the raised head and foot, whimpered and jumped off.
“I've got a medical situation here. Have a little heart,” I told the retreating dog. Her toenails clicked against the bathroom tile, and with a groan, she fell to the floor where she whimpered again.
“Good riddance.”
I'd asked Andy to pick up some Mylanta from the drugstore, but that had been days earlier. I understood. The man left for work before seven and dragged in while I prepared for bed; Suzanne wasn't much better. Besides, I hated being a whiner.
I reached over to turn on the light and there he was: Huckleberry Finn.
Precious Jesus!
My heart thumped like a kettledrum.
Huck sat on the back of the recliner, elbows to his knees. His legs crossed at the ankles, all relaxed and lackadaisical like, not a thought in his head about his muddy feet on the chair. He chewed on the end of a corncob pipe and looked straight at me. Like the mountainous staircase and the purple flowers I had seen sprouting from sidewalks and the like, he wasn't real. I can't say how I knew that. I just did, but he looked as real as anyone I'd ever known. A smudge of ash on his chin. A scab on his elbow. Eyes the color of the sky on the first rainless day of spring, the brightest color I'd seen in a long, long time. I stared into those eyes for a good long while, drinking in the brightness, praying he wouldn't evaporate. I studied him like a Monet or Cassatt painting, hoping to hold his image forever in my memory.
His shirt wouldn't do for a dusting cloth, it was so thin and frayed. It had been red once, that was plain enough; but one sleeve missed a cuff and the other was rolled to his elbow. I winced at his fingernails, jagged and packed with black dirt as they were. He'd been away from the Widow Douglas for some time.
A mixture of kindness and devilishness danced in his expression that made me want to reach out and ruffle his hair, but I dared not upset the mystical juxtaposition that brought him to me. From all those days on the river, when school got too binding for him and he played hooky to go fishing, his skin was ginger with a constellation of freckles on his face and arms. Fortunately he'd left his catch of catfish on a string somewhere else. I must have smiled because he winked at me.
“What was that for?” I asked.
He cocked his head, and I thought he might say something. When he didn't, I kept talking.
“Do I remind you of the Widow Douglas?” If he heard me, he didn't answer, so I kept talking on as if the sound of my voice anchored him in place. I didn't have any trouble finding a topic. With a father like Pap, Huck needed advice. “You shouldn't let Pap discourage you from learning how to read. Unscrambling all those words seems like an awful chore to you now, but you won't regret being able to read on a cold winter's night. That's when I do my reading. Otherwise, I bake pies or strap on snowshoes to go walking with my dog.” I caught myself. He didn't need to hear old-lady stories. His pap menaced him something awful. “Pap's just jealous. He sees you turning into a fine young man, gifted with common sense and a bright future, and he knows his chances to do the same are lost forever.”
Huck wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and I stifled the urge to scold him. Maybe he'd get talkative if I found a subject he liked. True, I'd never been part of a robber gang like him and Tom, but I grew up in the wilds of New Mexico and Tennessee and California.
“When I was a bit younger than you, I sneaked away with my sister to sleep under the stars, just like the Indians. By that time, my pa worked as a ranger at Yosemite, a place with granite cliffs, lush valleys, and heart-pounding waterfalls. Bears and mountain lions lived there too and worried Pa. If he'd known we left our beds like we did, he would have walloped us good, but we couldn't resist the pull of the night sky, not even Miss Prissy Pants, Evelyn. She was the one to stay awake until Pa's snoring rattled the windows because she was older and tossed and turned most of the night anyway. Then she'd wake me, and we snatched our winter quilts from under our beds to tiptoe out of the house.
“I agree with you, Huck, the sky is biggest when you're lying on your back, trying to make patterns of the stars. Even though she begged me not to, I told Evelyn scary stories I'd thought up while drying the dishes. I scared her bad enough that she returned to the cabin more than once. And then a twig might snap, or the wind moaned through the tops of the sequoias. That got me thinking about bears and mountain lions, and I loathe admitting so, but I soon followed her inside. On the nights we stayed under the stars, I woke up Evelyn while the moon still hung in the sky to go inside before our parents woke—Pa to mount his horse, General, to patrol the back country, and Ma to try to keep her girls civilized, just like Widow Douglas did for you.”
Huck crossed his arms and leaned back. I waited. His stories surely outpaced mine for adventure and danger. He played with the mouthpiece of his pipe but didn't utter a sound. I kept talking.

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