Cloud and Wallfish (2 page)
Read Cloud and Wallfish Online
Authors: Anne Nesbet
Noah’s mother dismissed the South Pole with a wave.
“Back to facts,” she said. “It’s not going to be easy, maybe, Noah, but you can do it. Hand that photo over, though, please.”
Noah stretched his hand out, but slowly, giving his eyes time to see the picture first. That tiny girl — she looked familiar around the edges. She was dressed up in party clothes, with a tiara on her head and a wand in her hand, and her eyes were dark and sparkly, like she had just figured out all sorts of things other people couldn’t imagine. She was maybe four years old, that little girl, and it looked like she was noticing every detail of your clothing, your hair, the nervous twitches that meant you might be trying to get away with something.
It was the look of the eyes that gave her away: this little girl was his mother. No doubt about that. There she was, four years old, maybe, and already formidable.
“Mom, it’s you!” he said. He had never seen a picture of his mother as a child before. He knew that was strange, but some families don’t have cameras. Or there’s a fire and all the photo albums burn right up. These things do happen. “Is that your dad, then? Is that . . . Grandpa?”
A folded newspaper dangled from the man’s hand — you could see about half the headline, in those big dark letters that newspapers use when they want to shout:
CORONA
—
Something else Noah had never seen a picture of before: any of his grandparents.
“Come on, now. Let go of that thing,” said his mother. He hadn’t realized he was still hanging on to it, but it was a picture filled with data, a puzzle of a picture, and Noah’s mind had woken right up as he looked at it.
So as Noah put the photo into his mother’s hand, he did that thing he could do with his brain: took a picture of the photograph, so he could study it later.
He used to think everyone could do this, but in second grade after his koala report, which had lasted forty minutes and contained a gazillion details, his teacher had given Noah two thumbs-up and called his memory “practically photographic.” It seemed to him true and not true, both at once. A “photographic memory” sounds like it should be just like a camera, but Noah’s brain was a fussy, not-so-perfectly-working camera. He couldn’t take a brain-photo of everything all the time — he could still forget plenty of stuff — but when the brain-camera worked, when Noah heard that tiny, secret
click,
then that picture was tucked away in his brain-file forever. His parents knew Noah had a good memory, but they didn’t know the truth, that Noah’s memory was
perfect —
sometimes. Imperfectly perfect. Perfect in a not-so-perfect sort of way.
That was Noah’s own secret. In a family as sharp-eyed as Noah’s, it was good to have some secrets even your mother didn’t know.
“Well, look at that,” said Noah’s mother, eyeing the photo with the strangest expression on her face. “Coronation day! I was a handful and a half, even then. Thought I should be queen of the world.”
“And why not?” said Noah’s father.
He smiled at Noah.
“Hey, look, there’s a vending machine! Why don’t you go ahead and get yourself a soda?” Noah’s father said. He pressed some coins into Noah’s hand. “And using the restroom’s a good idea, too. It’s going to be a bit of a long drive from here.”
Noah opened the door, but he didn’t yet get out of the car.
A horrible thought had swept down out of the clear blue sky and perched itself on Noah’s shoulder like a ten-ton crow. Noah turned and looked at his parents, his usually less-bizarre-acting parents, and asked, just to be sure: “You didn’t murder somebody, did you? Or rob a bunch of banks?”
His parents both laughed. His mom had a laugh that was like a sharp hoot of some wild, fast-flying bird, but his father chuckled in long, rolling rumbles.
“Nah,” said his father. “Nothing like that.”
“An expedition,” said his mother. “An urgent expedition, remember? So hurry.”
Secret File #1
WHAT THE MICROPHONE WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU
An important note: If you had been listening in to Noah’s family’s conversation, perhaps by having left a radio-transmitting microphone in the car they were driving, which is something people sometimes do, you would not have heard it the way I just wrote it out for you above. That is not only because conversations in real life are always jerkier and messier and more mumbly than the ones in books, but also in this case because everything Noah said always came out in shards and pieces, and that is very hard to portray in words. I have written down what he meant to say, and what his parents (who had years of practice understanding him) knew he was trying to say, but not what you yourself or your hidden microphone would have heard him saying.
Noah stuttered. Not just a cute hiccup around a “Denver” or a “dictionary,” either. Any number of sounds could just knock him right down.
For Noah, talking was like riding a bike with a wheel that liked to freeze up, almost out of nowhere. He would be sailing along down a sentence (so to speak), and along would come a word with a
b
or an
m
in it, something totally everyday like “bunch of books” or “mummy,” and that wheel would simply stop short, like an invisible wall had suddenly sprung up in the road before him, and he and his bicycle would just bang right into that wall and stop.
When this happens over and over, it becomes very tempting to ride your bike like you wish it had training wheels: to pedal along very, very slowly and carefully. Maybe even not to ride at all.
But Noah didn’t want to stay still, and he didn’t want to be silent, so he kept opening his mouth and plowing on. That was the sort of person he was. He was not a training-wheels kind of kid.
“Noah never stops trying! His attitude is good! He’s very persistent!” said all his teachers. “He’ll surely outgrow his difficulties with time!”
But it looked like maybe not, on the outgrowing thing. Noah had peeked into the books on stuttering his mother brought home from the library, and from all those pages of tiny print he had gathered that although little tiny kids often outgrow a stutter by the time they’re medium-little kids, someone who’s as old as eleven may —
may
— be a stutterer all his life long.
“But there’s nothing you can’t do!” his mother had said to him a hundred times. “Look at all those famous actors who used to stutter! Think of them! James Earl Jones, the guy who does Darth Vader’s voice — I heard
he
used to stutter.”
It didn’t always help, thinking of famous actors who
used to stutter.
They sure didn’t seem to be stuttering now. Noah would have paid all the dimes in his dime collection to hear some famous movie actor open his mouth and get stuck. Darth Vader with a stutter! Noah would have liked to hear
that
!
Anyway, this is all just to say that much of what Noah said to his parents in the conversation in the car had a sort of explosive, machine-gun stop-and-start quality and would not necessarily have been understood by a casual bystander. But Noah and his parents understood each other, after long practice, reasonably well.
Let’s be clear, though: understanding the words your parents say is not the same as understanding what they’re up to when they announce out of the blue that you’ll be leaving your old life behind this very minute, right now, today.
It turns out that even people who don’t stutter at all can sometimes be thoroughly incomprehensible.
When Noah Came Out Of The Restroom, He Found His Parents Gathered Around A Trash Can In The Parking lot. His father was stuffing garbage bags full of who-knows-what into the trash can, and his mother was holding a match to the corner of something in her hands. It turned out to be the very photograph Noah had just found in his mother’s old book.
“Stop! What are you doing?” said Noah. Or, rather, intended to say. He was so horrified that his voice stopped, too. He made a sound that was itself a little like fire hissing, and that was all.
The only photo he had ever seen of his mother as a child, and she was burning it up?
“Don’t wave your arms around like that,” said his mother as she calmly watched the flames eat away at the edges of the picture and then stamped the ashes into the pavement. “There, that’s better. One of those good rules for all travelers: don’t draw attention to yourself, ever.”
“It’s just a picture,” said his dad, but at least he sounded a little sad about it. None of this made sense. Then Noah caught a glimpse of a neon-yellow zipper in the garbage can.
“That’s my backpack,” he said. “It’s
new.
”
And it had excellent Batman logos on the many pockets. It was a terrific backpack.
“Can’t be helped,” said his mother. “It has to go. It has your name scrawled right across the top in indelible marker.”
Why was that a problem? If you didn’t have your name on your backpack, you couldn’t bring it on the aquarium field trip: his mom knew that. She had written that
N. KELLER
there herself, just last month. And now they were throwing the whole backpack out?
“It’s because of where we’re going,” said his father. “We have to be very careful about everything. Come on, let’s get back in the car.”
“People can’t have Batman backpacks in Germany?”
“It’s not just the usual Germany we’re headed to — it’s
East
Germany,” said his father. “That’s the one behind the Iron Curtain.”
“East Germany?” said Noah. His mind was having trouble with the image of a curtain made out of iron. Curtains were supposed to ripple in the breeze.
“Remember the Olympics?” prompted his father.
That’s right. There had been two Germanies at the Olympic Games last summer. His parents had pointed that out to him then. One Germany was friends with the United States; the other Germany was somehow connected with Russia — now also called “the Soviet Union,” just to make things more complicated.
“Swimmers,” said Noah. “Didn’t they have a lot of swimmers?”
“You got it! East Germany — the Communist one — the German Democratic Republic. Home of some very strong swimmers! So here’s the thing. You know how your mother has been studying to be a teacher?”
“Sure,” said Noah. Secretly he thought she would be an excellent and terrifying teacher.
“And so she’s doing research on —?”
Noah knew this part, too: “Kids who have trouble speaking,” he said. “What does that have to do with swimmers, though?”
His mom hooted a little, like an amused owl.
“Nothing!” said his dad. “Stuttering, not swimming!”
“‘Differential Approaches to Elementary Education for Children with Speech-Production Impediments in East and West,’” said Noah’s mother. She said that title so fast it sounded like one impossible thirty-three syllable word. “Because I figured my thesis needed a comparative angle. A unique, comparative angle. Not just American schools. Schools from somewhere different, from a different system. So! Brainstorm! Bingo!
East Germany!
They’re quite interested in special education there, it turns out. And it’s hard to get more different than East Germany!”
They were all already back in the car. Noah’s mother turned the key with gusto, and the engine roared awake again. Noah looked back at the bright-yellow strap of his Batman backpack, poking out of the garbage can, and felt very strange about everything that was happening.
None of this sounded even the slightest bit like visiting the Black Forest and eating cake.
He was sorry about the cake, but on the other hand, Noah’s mother had been working on her graduate degree in special education as long as Noah could remember. Mostly that seemed to mean reading books with very plain covers and long titles, and sometimes using Noah as a guinea pig for all the various tests she had to learn how to give. Noah and his dad both took a lot of pride in being the Most Supportive Family Ever about Noah’s mother’s doctorate.
“There you go,” said Noah’s father. “It’s going to be an absolutely terrific thesis. But it turns out we have to go now.”
“Before schools let out there,” said his mom. “And other reasons: change being in the air, the visas having come through.”
“What’s a visa?”
“Official permission to enter a country,” said his mother. “Visas can be very hard to get for a place like East Germany. Lots of forms. And you can’t just jump up and decide you want to go there. First you have to apply to get a fellowship from this outfit in Washington, D.C., called the International Research and Exchanges Board — they’re the ones who fund this kind of trip. Did I mention I’m being paid? Actual money? To do research?”
“Well, it’s a great topic,” said Noah’s father. “Right, Noah?”
“Sure,” said Noah. His mind, however, was a great big tangle of swimmers and cake.
“Thanks!” said his mother. “So that’s how it went. First I got the fellowship, and then the East Germans needed to think about whether to give us our visas. They dig into everything. They ask all sorts of questions. But now we’ve got the visas, so we can go.”
“When are we coming back?” asked Noah. He didn’t want to miss any more soccer practices than he had to.