As Simple as It Seems (7 page)

“If you don't believe in heaven while you're alive, but then when you die you find out it's actually a real place, can you still go there?”

I was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up my breakfast. My mother was standing at the sink, stringing beans.

“Where in the world did that question come from?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I was just wondering. Is that where Grandpa Colty is? Heaven?”

My mother looked at me.

“Your grandpa Colty was a very good man. If there is a heaven, I'm sure that's where he is.”

“Where else could he be?” I asked.

“Different people believe different things,” she said, turning her attention back to the beans.

“What do
you
believe?” I asked.

“Well, if I had to put it into words, I guess I'd say that I believe life is like a big circle,” she said. “Each ending marks a new beginning.”

“Some people believe that your soul leaves your body the last time you breathe out,” I said, remembering what Pooch had told me.

My mother set down her knife.

“It's a beautiful day outside; we don't need to be talking about last breaths, do we?”

I shrugged and took a bite of my pink eggs.

Pink eggs had been a favorite of mine when I was little. You make them by frying an egg and then at the last minute putting a drop of water in the pan and covering it up to steam the yolk until it turns pink. I hadn't had them in years, but my mother had made them for me that morning without asking.

“I just thought it was interesting, that's all,” I said.

My mother's face suddenly brightened.

“Speaking of interesting, I have some interesting news,” she said. “Guess what—we have a new neighbor. Someone has rented the Allen house.”

I almost choked, but I took a swallow of milk to cover it. I wasn't in the habit of lying to my mother, but I didn't want her to know that I already knew about the
new neighbors. It would only lead to questions. She'd noticed my torn nightgown, of course, but she'd been satisfied with the explanation I'd given her about going for a long walk with Jack the day before and having caught it on some blackberry brambles.

“It's a woman and her little boy,” my mother went on. “Francine told me about them this morning when I went down to get the mail.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to keep my voice even as I peeled a piece of crust off my bread and laid it along the edge of the plate. “What did she say about them?”

My mother hesitated, obviously weighing whether or not to repeat what she'd heard.

“You know how Francine likes to talk,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“What did she say?” I asked, doing my best not to sound overly interested.

“Apparently the woman wasn't feeling well, because she stayed out in the car. Only the boy came inside. Francine said he was odd—scratching himself a lot and asking all kinds of strange questions.”

“Francine should keep her big trap shut,” I said, surprised at the feeling with which the words came out.

“Verbie,”
my mother scolded, “that's no way to talk.”

“Francine's the one who's saying things she shouldn't.
What's wrong with asking questions? And what's so odd about being itchy? Everybody gets itchy sometimes. Maybe he's got a rash, or an allergy or something. Did you ever think of that?”

My mother was staring at me.

“What's gotten into you?” she asked.

“What's gotten into
you
?” I said, pushing back my chair with such force it fell over backward. I righted the chair and carried my dishes over to the sink to rinse them off. All I wanted was to get out of there before I did something worse than knock over my chair.

“Let's not end on a bad note,” my mother said, taking the wet plate from me and putting it in the dishwasher. “We were having such a nice talk before.”

“We were?” I said.

“You and I have always been like two peas in a pod, Verbie.”

Two peas in a pod?
I could barely stand to be around her anymore. I knew who I was really like.

“If you say so,” I said as I swirled water around in my glass before pouring it down the drain and handing the glass to her.

“What are your plans this morning?” she asked in a tone I recognized as the same cautious voice she always used when she reached out her hand to a dog she wasn't
sure was safe to pet. Maybe I wasn't the only one who saw the similarities between Teddy and myself.

“I could use some help getting the strawberries ready for the shortcakes,” my mother told me. “I'm going to be making two this year—one for the raffle and one for us. Won't that be nice?”

“I've already got plans,” I said.

“You do?” She sounded pleased.

“I'm going for a walk.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed. “Another walk?”

Down at the lake with Pooch the day before, pulling the boat out of the mud, I'd felt happier than I'd been in a long time. Pooch was a nine-year-old flatlander, an itchy boy who believed in ghosts and didn't know beans about bugs or salamanders, but I didn't care. l liked being with him. He didn't know who I really was, and when I was with him I got to pretend that I didn't know either.

I hadn't thought about Teddy or Grace or Mike Colter even once when I was with Pooch, and I hadn't missed Annie either, but a ten-minute conversation with my mother was all it took to tie me up in knots again.

“One day you're telling me I ought to go out and get some fresh air, and the next day you act like there's something wrong with going for a walk!” I shouted at
her. “Make up your mind, will you?”

My mother sighed, and dried her hands on the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door handle.

“I didn't mean to step on your toes or imply there was anything wrong with taking a walk. Just do me a favor and get dressed before you go outside today, okay? That nightie is a disgrace. If the new neighbors see you walking around looking like that, they're going to think I'm the worst mother on earth.”

“Maybe you are.”

I should have gotten out of there sooner, before things had escalated to the point where I couldn't control my own tongue. Those three ugly words hung in the air between us like black smoke until finally my mother spoke.

“Have a nice walk, Verbena,” she said. Then she turned her back, opened the faucet, and began to rinse the beans.

I left my mother in the kitchen and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I felt awful.

“Who are you?” I thought as I stared at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.

I hadn't meant what I'd said. As annoyed as I got with my mother sometimes, I knew I was lucky to have her. If she and my father hadn't taken me, there's no
telling what might have happened to me. Still, I couldn't bring myself to go back into the kitchen and apologize to my mother. I couldn't bear to see the hurt look on her face. Even though she had to have known the day would come when her perfect little girl would show her true colors, I still felt guilty about disappointing her.

Pooch would be heading down to the lake soon, and I was dying to leave my troubles behind and get back to the boat. I'd come up with a list of supplies we would need—sandpaper, glue, a hammer, and a few other odds and ends I thought we could use. My father had all those things out in his workshop, but I wasn't allowed to go in there when he wasn't around. Besides, he wouldn't have let me take any tools away with me. He was very particular about his things.

The floor of the shop was always swept clean, the wood scraps piled neatly by the door. Over his workbench the wall was made of pegboard, the outline of every tool he owned drawn around it in black Magic Marker so that he'd know exactly where to put it back after he'd finished using it. A row of hammers marched across the wall like steadfast soldiers, shoulders squared, heads all facing in the same direction. Screwdrivers with translucent red handles were arranged in descending order of size like a family posing for a formal portrait.
The whole place smelled of sawdust and varnish, and there was a feeling of peace and purposefulness in the air that reminded me for some reason of church.

There was a closet off the mudroom in the back of the house where my father kept a stash of old tools for quick fix-it jobs around the house. I decided to look there for what I needed. On my way down the hall, I passed a wall of family photographs and accidentally brushed up against one of the wooden frames with my shoulder, knocking it crooked on the hook. I paused to straighten it.

It was a picture of the two Colter brothers standing on the front steps of the house. There were enough similarities between them that you could tell they were related, but it was obvious just from the photo that their personalities were completely different. My father, Tom, in jeans and a flannel shirt, smiled directly into the camera, his arm draped loosely around his younger brother's shoulders. Mike held his arms straight down by his sides, and he was looking away from the camera, scowling. He wore a leather jacket and sunglasses, and his hair was all slicked down with grease and combed back like the guys who hung around the Washerville Gas and Go at night. That photograph had interested me long before I found out that I was Mike Colter's daughter.

“How come Daddy and Uncle Mike don't match?” I remember asking my mother one day.

We were sitting together on the front porch in the wooden chair swing my grandfather had hung there years ago for my grandma Betsy when they had lived in the house. My mother pushed herself up out of the swing, took me by the hand, and led me over to the edge of the yard where a tangle of blackberry brambles grew.

“Look here, Verbie,” she said. “See how some of the berries on this bush are plump and juicy?” She reached out and barely touched a ripe berry, which was all it took to separate it from its nub. It rolled into her open palm and she held it out to me. “You can tell just by looking at it how sweet this one will taste.”

I took the berry from her and slipped it into my mouth. It was soft and full of juice. “Now look at these other berries,” she said. “They're growing right alongside the sweet ones on the very same bush, but for some reason they turned out small and bitter, like hard little fists full of seeds.” She touched a small, dark purple berry with her fingertip, but it held tightly to its nub.

“Those are the Uncle Mikes, aren't they?” I said.

My mother put her arm around me, resting her cheek on the top of my head.

“Everybody was put here on this earth for a reason, Sugarpea,” she said. “Even Mike Colter.”

“Was he really as bad as everybody says he was?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But there must have been a little bit of good in him too—otherwise—”

 

She never finished that sentence, but years later standing in the hallway looking at the photograph of the two Colter brothers, I knew that the reason my mother had stopped herself was because the rest of the sentence probably would have been something like “—otherwise he couldn't have made someone as perfect as you.” She hadn't wanted me to know the truth. And she hadn't wanted anybody else to know either. People in small towns don't forget easily. And they don't forgive either. They would have heard the time bomb ticking away inside me and known that trouble was coming.

Pooch was already there when I got to the lake, squatting down in the weeds beside the boat. He didn't see me at first.

“Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look in that?” I called out to him.

He was wearing his mother's big floppy hat. The one I had seen her in the day before.

“It keeps the sun off my face,” he called back. “Come look at what I found. It's a hole.”

I pushed up my glasses with a knuckle and put one hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun.

“How big is it?”

“Like so,” he said, making a circle with his hand about the size of a golf ball to show me. “Come look.”

I laid the tools and other supplies down in the grass
and walked over to the boat.

“Is this the only one you found, or are there others?” I asked, squatting down next to Pooch and pressing my fingertips into the ragged opening.

Pooch explained that he'd examined the whole boat and this was the only hole he'd found.

“I was thinking maybe we could plug it up with one of those rubber thingies you use in the bathtub.”

“The wood around the hole is rotten,” I pointed out. “A plug wouldn't work. The water would leak in around it. What we need is a patch to glue over the hole.”

“Do we have a patch?” asked Pooch.

“No,” I said, “and we don't have any glue either.”

Glue had been one of the things on my list, but the bottle I'd found in the tool closet had been all dried up.

“Hey!” said Pooch, snapping his fingers. “I just thought of something. Why don't we use birch bark and pine gum to patch the hole like the Lenape Indians did with their canoes? I learned all about that last year in school.”

Pooch's school must have had the same social studies curriculum as ours, because we'd studied the
art of canoe making in fourth grade too. I loved the idea of trying to patch the boat with bark, and it just so happened there was a stand of white birch trees not ten feet away from where we were.

“We can use the hammer claw to peel off the bark. And I brought some nails too,” I said. “There are tons of pine trees around here. We can make holes with the nails to get the pitch out.”

Pooch squinched up his eyebrows, signaling an oncoming question I had anticipated he might ask.

“Where did you get all that stuff anyway?”

I told him that because I'd slept well the night before, I'd been able to store up enough energy to go invisible and float into somebody's toolshed to borrow a few things.

“It must feel amazing to be invisible,” Pooch said wistfully.

“Actually, it tickles,” I told him. “Now grab that hammer and let's get started.”

 

I carried the hammer, Pooch followed along behind me in his ridiculous hat, and Jack, who had tagged along again, brought up the rear.

“How does it work?” Pooch asked as we made our
way over to the stand of birch trees. “When you're invisible and you're holding something, does it get invisible too? Or is it like in the movies when they use wires to make it look like things are floating around all by themselves?”

I didn't feel like having to make up answers to Pooch's questions all day. I just wanted to work on the boat.

“No more questions about ghost stuff today, okay?”

Pooch nodded. Then he leaned down to give Jack a pat on the head and immediately sneezed.

“I guess Jack's not hypoallergenic, huh?” I said.

“Correct,” said Pooch, pinching his nose to stifle another sneeze.

 

I chose a birch tree I thought looked good, and slipping the metal claw of the hammer under a piece of loose bark, I tried to ease it away from the trunk. After three or four unsuccessful attempts, I kicked the tree in frustration. No matter how careful I was, the papery bark kept splitting into narrow strips, like the curls of bread crust I'd left on the edge of my plate at breakfast.

“How in the world did the Indians
do
this?” I said, pausing to wipe my sweaty hands on my nightgown.

“You're not supposed to call them
Indians
anymore,” Pooch told me. “You're supposed to say
Native Americans
.”

“That's only in school,” I said. “In real life everyone still says Indian.”

After a few more attempts to pull off a piece of bark big enough to use as a patch, I lowered the hammer again. My arms ached and a tight knot had formed between my shoulder blades.

“This isn't working,” I said.

“I can take a turn if you want,” Pooch offered.

His arms were even skinnier than mine, but I handed over the hammer anyway. I'd pretty much massacred the bark on the tree I'd been working on, so we moved a little deeper into the grove and chose a fresh trunk.

“If you were an Indian, what do you think your name would be?” Pooch asked as he chose his starting point and carefully worked the hammer claw under the papery white skin of the tree. “You know, like Running Bear or Sitting Squaw.”

“I don't know,” I said. “What about you?”

“With my luck, if I was an Indian, one of my mother's boyfriends would get to pick my name,” he said.

I laughed.

“I'd probably get stuck with a name as weird as the
one I have now,” I told him.

I didn't realize my mistake until it was too late.

“What's so weird about the name Tracy?” Pooch asked.

The answer, of course, was nothing. I was thinking of my own name, Verbena. I'd been so busy trying to peel bark, I'd forgotten I was supposed to be pretending to be Tracy Allen.

“Tracy is actually my middle name,” I said, frantically trying to cover my tracks. “But don't ask me what my real name is because I never tell anybody.”

“What letter does it start with. Maybe I can guess,” said Pooch.

“No,” I told him, “I don't want you to guess. Let's just get the bark off the tree so we can patch the boat, okay?”

 

It turned out that Pooch had a way with birch bark. On his first try he successfully pulled off a piece more than big enough for our patching purposes.

“Now all we need is some pitch,” I said.

We went back and got the nails, which Pooch put into one of his many pockets. His pants were a different color but they were the same kind as the ones he'd had on the day before.

“Is that the only kind of pants you ever wear?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” said Pooch. “I need a lot of pockets.”

“What for?”

“All kinds of stuff.” Pooch started patting his pockets. “I've got tissues, hand sanitizer, my bottles in case I find anything cool, and my EpiPen, of course.”

“What's that?”

“It's got medicine in it in case I have an allergy attack, like if a bee stings me.”

“I don't like bees,” I said.

“Me neither,” said Pooch.

We quickly discovered that it wasn't necessary to make holes in a pine tree in order to get pitch; beads of amber gum oozed out of the bark without any help from us. We used the nails to scrape the pitch directly onto the patch.

“Man, is this stuff sticky,” said Pooch. “I sure hope I'm not allergic to it, 'cause it's getting all over me.”

“How do you know if you're allergic to something—do you start sneezing?” I asked.

“Sometimes. Or sometimes I get hives. If it's really bad my tongue swells up and I can't breathe. You can die from an allergic reaction, but I guess you don't want to hear about that.”

“How's your tongue feel right now?” I asked.

Pooch stuck out his tongue and looked down his nose at it.

“So far so good,” he said.

It had been almost two years since I had studied the art of canoe making, but the details were still fresh in Pooch's mind.

“The Indians had two ways of storing their canoes to keep them from drying out,” he told me. “Either they turned them upside down and put them in the shade under buffalo hides or they filled them up with heavy rocks and sank them in the river until it was time to use them.”

“I don't think we need to worry about the boat drying out,” I said. “It's still pretty wet from having had all that water in it.”

“Good point,” said Pooch.

We carried the sticky patch back over to the boat and pressed it onto the side to cover the hole. To our delight, it worked perfectly.

“How long do you think it'll take before it's dry?” Pooch asked as he stood back to admire our handiwork.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe overnight. As long as it doesn't rain.”

Leaving the patch to cure, we turned our attention
to another task, sanding.

“Let's do the seats first,” said Pooch, taking a sheet of sandpaper and folding it into a square, “so we won't get splinters when we sit down in her.”

I laughed.

“That sounds funny—sit down in
her
.”

“Well, that's what you're supposed to say, isn't it?” said Pooch. “All boats are shes. Come on, help me turn her back over.”

Being careful not to dislodge the freshly applied patch, the two of us turned the boat over. When we were done, Pooch hopped in.

“This is awesome!” he cried. “I can't wait 'til tomorrow, when we can see if she floats.”

I hiked up my nightgown and was about to climb into the boat to join him when I noticed something. On the side, near the front, was the faint outline of a letter.

“Look,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Pooch, clambering out of the boat.

“She has a name.”