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“So you didn't see him.”

“Oh sure, I saw him. They bring them in. I was real happy, seeing him there. I was—I guess I was so drugged out or something, but I just kept waiting for him to open up his eyes, you know?”

“He's got such blond hair,” said Willa.

“His daddy's a towhead.” Melody leaned toward Willa and whispered confidentially. “I'm blond, too, really,” she said, lifting a lock of her dark hair, “but not white blond like him, more washed out, kind of dirty blond. Now you've got a real pretty color. That's all natural, huh?”

Willa nodded, and Melody smiled a crooked smile which almost looked sad. Then she touched the tip of Willa's nose with an outstretched finger.

“Lucky you. Hang onto that hair, okay?”

She scooped the rest of the cut apple into her hand, tossed the core into the garbage can, and walked away.

When Willa went to the living room, she saw Melody on the floor with the boy. They were playing the game where his mouth was a tunnel, the apple a chugging train. Jo-Jo was laughing and had his fingers splayed across his mother's face. Willa stood in the doorway, a sour feeling in her gut.

“I hate to say it, but we've got to get going,” Melody said to her mother.

And her mother answered, her voice quick and concerned. “So soon, but you just got here. You hardly drew at all.”

“They say the weather won't hold out.” Melody looked up at the ceiling as if it were the sky. “We have a drive.”

Willa's mother came and stood with her while Melody lay Jo-Jo on his back and zipped him into a snowsuit. Then she and her mother moved to the front door and watched Melody pick her way down the slippery stairs with the boy on one hip, a knapsack on her back, her drawings in a roll under her arm.

“You two take care now, okay?” said Melody, turning when she reached the bottom step, and Willa smiled a quavering, forced smile. Melody strapped Jo-Jo into a car seat that looked like an elaborate plastic bubble, slid into the driver's seat, and sat there a moment warming up. The car was blue and rusty, coughing as if the air were too much for it, but after a minute Melody waved. Then she and Jo-Jo drove away.

“Why couldn't they have stayed longer?” Willa asked after the car and then the sound of the car had disappeared. “I have nobody to play with.”

“I don't know, honey,” said her mother, and her voice sounded tired and disappointed. “People have things to do.”

Willa went to her room and lifted the cardboard shield which tricked her ants into thinking they were underground. They froze for an instant, then saw it was just Willa and continued on. Their paths were so easy to follow; she could see through the glass on both sides and watch their every move. She would let them go, she decided. Not now, when the ground was frozen, but in spring when the earth grew soft and they could burrow down. She would take the farm outdoors, crack open its sides, and let the ants spill out like beads.

But then Willa remembered the Queen ant, the one who had broken off her own wings when she settled in the farm to lay her eggs, who lived off the energy of her useless flight muscles, leaving the broken wings in a corner of the farm. Auto-amputation was what they called it in
The Wonder World of Ants.
Willa had wanted to get rid of those wings, hated looking at them, but she couldn't reach them without dismantling the farm. The Queen couldn't fly, and she was too fat to walk. Out in the world, abandoned by her guards and workers, she would die.

Willa wished her ants were leafcutter ants, the kind who dragged bits of plants and caterpillar droppings to their underground nests and grew fungus on them, like farmers. Then they ate the fungus and fed it to their kids. That was practical—the leafcutters could live through almost anything, but Willa's ants were used to bread and honey and being fed by her. The missing children, the way she saw them, were more like leafcutter ants. Somehow they knew how to get by.

Ants had survived on this earth for more than a hundred million years. It didn't surprise her. The smaller you were, the better your chances. Her
mother made her drink milk so she would grow big and strong and so there would be cartons for the soup. But big and strong was the wrong thing; small was what you had to be. She would not drink milk anymore. In the end, if it came to that, she would find a friend like Jo-Jo. Underground he would shine in his paleness like the fireflies in summer in the fields out back. Blind, Jo-Jo would be able to sense corners, the twisted workings of the paths, and if she took his hand, he would guide her far from the silos, deep into the insulated center of the earth.

Jane McCafferty

You can pretend when your father comes home from the war he's all right, same as he'll pretend same as your mother will pretend. First, the big supper!

She got in her apron, wore it like the miniskirt, tied the sash tight, put on nylons, high heels, nothing else, just the apron with the fruit that's the wrong color meaning oranges are grape and vice versa, someone's humor we don't need it.

He's with his keys, we don't know what they go to, there are fifty-two of them altogether, only I know because only I counted, it was night, they were over my head. All he wanted to do was cry, that was how it had to be. He said to her, you get out of bed so I can cry in peace. Get out of my dream. Out! Really loud, you would think to yourself, the neighbors.

Right over my head so on the gray couch looking at the ceiling I thought they might crash on through, would they be bare, I wouldn't want to see, I'm not like the others, especially the ones who do it, and they do it
in the outdoors, for instance in a parking lot, even though I would say, “There's broken glass and you'll get cut.” Once a girl said she likes it, the getting cut part, by the name of Yolanda Finch, not a lie.

You can still be a child, for instance, you can say no, I don't think I'll grow up yet, then you think it so hard, it works, and you go to a movie and get the child rate maybe all your life hunching.

And sometimes you can feel like saying to your mother that you don't like the world, so this way she'll say drink some milk, take a nap, or make a joke and say the world don't like you either but don't you already know that.

In the mornings you all sit at the white table, the kitchen seems full of fog, there should be a horn, she looks all right in her nightgown, he wears his underwear, calls them
drawers
and maybe his shoes on too, maybe even combat boots depending on his mood, you think to yourself I'm not inviting friends over anymore and your mother makes the joke, What friends?

There are all those times when you forget who you are. It can be like you're the impersonator and they're paying you, you can convince so many that you are yourself.

So she's standing at the stove frying eggs which he loves. So we think, when all the sudden he says “Tell me why you're cooking eggs.” She turns around and says, For breakfast Silly, smiling but it's the crying tone now.

Also outside there is yelling. The bottle breaker likes the morning and to say Somebody Somebody. Like a rooster it could wake you, we're not on a farm, you can go to the windows press your forehead and see the bottles breaking. You might want to go to a farm for health, a little air. I could grow up and have a farmhouse, very quiet, I love nature and wouldn't need a car.

After he said “Breakfast, is that right?” he took the ring of fifty-two keys and examined it like a huge seaweed thing, it should be dripping wet. He shook it just a little, a little music in the kitchen, there goes the hole.

Important, he said. Important thing is to be a good
spy.
My mother turned around and said Come again?

Zenia, he said to me, Sometimes I look at you and think you're less than human. And I mean that as a compliment.

And my mother turned from the stove. Very lonely when she said
nothing, and I said Why you got that look, it's a joke, he's funny, he's making a joke. Why are you looking so serious, spoiling everything! My father nods, then gives me the wink. Then says in the old voice: First we need raincoats.

That's right, I said, and then we laugh, do we know where we are? The nervous laughter, all those keys!

“Good-bye,” I said to her. She folded her thin arms, that's all I can say, I wasn't interested in her eyes.

So we got into his car, which first he stood back, looked at smiling. This piece of shit, he said, it'll take us nowhere fast.

We got into the front seat, red like blood under my legs. Sun washed through the windshield so we squinted. I just clearly saw how I was, another person, and quiet in the piece of shit car.

We didn't look at each other, how could we. How do you say why you don't look. To get through it you stare straight ahead.

You miss me? How much? As much as you thought? and he asked me all three questions as usual before I even answered the first.

What did I say? Nothing! I loved him! I should've found my voice!

He started up the car, I was all right in his book he said. We drove, there was that sizzling sound, so the streets were wet. Tulip tree, he said, every time we passed one. And made an explosion sound. The trees were beautiful.

“Where's the raincoat store, honey?” he said, then looked over. I saw his eyes, you don't know how a hand can reach out of the pupil, which in him was then large, but I saw the hand reaching, maybe waving good-bye, maybe I wanted to say that too, good-bye! But you just look at each other anyway, it's a part of your life, your life and not to block things out.

“I don't know any raincoat stores,” I said, talking in the tone of everything's fine. “Raincoat stores, hmmmm,” I said, very cheerful since the silence. Then I said, “Can we turn on the radio?” and he said, “Radio?” and got a big smile on his face. “That's a fantastic idea!”

You thought I invented the radio!

When really, when I was small, it was us on the road listening to the radio, all the windows rolled down, that's how the years went by I think now, and then I was very happy. You can't imagine how many good songs
there were. Every so often his hand reaching over and sitting on my head like a nice cap to keep my thoughts down.

You think about the hands you held once.

We sailed down the freeway like a speedboat. I could see the road was water going fast. He said, “Sears,” and I nodded, very cheerful. There was green sky out the windows, and he had his keys on his lap like a small dog, that was the sad part. His hand smoothing them.

Before Sears there was a bar. I forget the name. The bartender told him No little girls and he said Little? Who's little? Then he said, Please, if she sits quiet on the end stool? The bartender shrugged. My father said he just wanted one drink and he'd be mighty quick.

He made it so quick my eyes didn't even get used to the dark. I was still blind from the daylight shining off the wet gray sidewalk. He put his finger up in the air and said, “To the raincoats!”

You can pretend people aren't gone, but really they are, that doesn't mean they're not them anymore. They're still blood.

In Sears he said for instance, “No we don't need any help” to the saleslady, and he said it so quiet, like a whisper, and his eyes fluttered, fluttered, froze.

He took us to the boy section. Girl raincoats aren't for spies, he said.

He picked out one real nice spy raincoat, size twelve, beige colored plain, dark lining.

Try it on, Zeen Queen.

That was the old name. It will tell you he had a sense of humor, also he made up songs for me and sang them when we drove. “Zeen-Queen, Zeen-Queen, what did the world mean.”

In the spy coat I stood before the mirror and he gave a whistle. You know the whole Sears heard. “Beautiful!” he said, and asked a stranger, “Whatta you think, does she look like a spy?”

The stranger nodded very cheerful. Then we went to the men's section. He found a raincoat just like mine, three times as big and put it on. Handsome. I'm telling you.

He looked in the mirror, not at the front self but walking away he looked at the back of him, looking over his shoulder to see how he looked leaving.

“We're all set,” he said.

“Sure Papa, what you say goes.”

And then I snap my finger like the Three Stooges on the television, he used to watch with me on his shoulders. He used to be like that, a man watching television with a girl on his shoulders, four years old and smaller, before he saw them stick grenades up the village girls which he told us in his old voice in the other bar where the bartender didn't care how long I stayed. That was later in the night. We were in our spy coats. Let me go backwards.

He said at least he wasn't a Seal. They do things he couldn't imagine. The hardest things, he said. And black seals were slipping all over inside my head throwing red balls so when I told him, he had to say, “Not those kind of seals! Christ!” I was then blocking it out and seeing his hand on the pile of keys making him popular in the bar. They kept saying “Why all the keys? Why all the keys?” Laughing together against him.

There are so many people think it's a joke. Pick up your keys, we can leave the bar, I told him.

We were then back in the car. We drove in the dark playing spies. “There is so much to spy on,” he kept saying. Beeped the horn. There in the Valiant the red front seat with the moon. It's dark enough. Both of us in our spy coats, he slides through the rich section, where I know people for instance from school. They look like magazines, very rich. He slid by in the car and we stared very hard at the houses. We spied on many things, the lit windows, the yellow flowers, the big lawns, we saw it all. A sprinkler, a sprinkler, shooting the air. An old man looking at the sky with a dog in his arms.

Then we spied on other things. The highway. We stared very hard at the other cars when they drove by us. Spying right on the driver, if they saw we didn't look away, kept spying.

Soon we were going so slow. We had a lane to ourself. Twenty miles an hour right on the freeway. He said he didn't care where his ass ended up. I remember his tone. We drove along.

“We could go spy on Supermarket,” he said, he forgot the name. We did that, we drove slow by the window of Shop N' Save, all lit up and the
shoppers inside with carts not knowing we were spying, and then he turned into the director.

“Keep shopping,” he told them, don't stop. He nodded, he told them they were doing a good job. He was the director now. We were back on the freeway and he told the cars, “That's right, keep it up now, keep driving, that's right,” and he nodded. He told them he was very proud of them, and also the light, he told it to change red so we could stop, then told the light it was very good, he was proud. We then passed a woman lit up in a glass telephone booth. “Insert the coin and make the call,” he directed, and she did.

Also we went to the factory, leather I think, the one under the bridge, there was a big chain link fence, we spied through it, we saw the factory wall. Our shadows were there. How his hands were on the fence is very clear. He shook the fence. Then he put the collar of his spy coat up and told me to do the same. We looked at our black shadows on the wall and waved to them. Then, back to the car, and now the keys between us and also his hand patting them. Next.

We spied on sheep. They are downstate, way past Dover. We were flying, he directed the other cars, “Keep going, you're all doing fine, just keep driving.” He directed the moon, he said, “Shine shine and don't fall down,” and to the litter he pointed and said “Lie there and look awful” and we were going so fast the farmhouses float, float up off the land, he told them to. All the land was black and under the sheep. He pulled the car up and shined his lights on the sheep. We spied very long, he told them they were being good, doing a good job. He said stand there and look at us and they did. White wool bodies, black faces, pink ears and black legs. When they spoke the sound was men trapped inside.

Look at these poor animals, he said, they don't want to be here, they want to go to another planet, can't you tell? I kept looking at the sheep, just looking now, not spying. And they turned their faces, you could see the world turning away from you.

All the sheep were walking away and then he said “Your mother's in a dream world, a dream world all her own, and I don't know what's happening here.” You kissed him as he cried like kissing him good-bye and
hello at the same time you're not sure, push him away as hard as you can.

Very quiet. Back upstate. We drove and drove. Then we went down our street. It is very narrow, it never struck me how narrow our street was but then it did, that night, all the houses stuck together, we got claustrophobia. But he told the houses “Keep standing still in the moonlight.” And then he parked right outside our house.

We spied from the car. Tears were running down. Already she was in the nightgown, roses on white. First she was in one window, her arms crossed. “You just stand there with your arms crossed,” he said. “That's right. Then in another window. That's right,” he said. “Walk from window to window in your roses.” She then stood in the big window, lit a cigarette as he told her, “Light a cigarette. Now inhale. That's good, now smoke it.” She smoked it, and he said “Perfect.”

Let's go in please.

In the morning I woke up, he was gone. I could feel it, it's for good, maybe he went to another country. You don't hope for return.

My mother cried and didn't get dressed for some time. Then a new man came, one who brought me presents:

1 crossword books

2 red socks with light blue stars

3 underwater snow scene thing

4 china mouse with gray vest plus spectacles

5 poster of sea gull flying over ocean

6 notebook, pencils

7 a record by a fellow named B. B. King

8 several times, candy, including Baby Ruth, a personal favorite

A
very
nice man, nobody should complain, by the name of Everett and feels great sympathy for all the peoples of the earth. He and my mother sit at the white table now, two voices behind the wall, you can get the glass and press your ear. She said to him last night I'm like my father, and she can't help that damn it. Other people's husbands come back just fine, she said, in a way I'm glad he's gone. It's a big relief, she said. They were drinking hot water with lemon in it like they do with saltines.

To peel off my black leotards every night then to sleep, not under the blankets, they itch my skin, but under his spy coat, it smells like him, left behind on purpose, don't you think? and I clench my eyes shut and there is the sheep, every time, rising off the black land into the stars and inside the sheep's mind me pushing him away and his voice so clear in my head still directing. He tells the sheep
Fly
and they're already flying, so they fly.