Fig (2 page)

The encyclopedia is always open now, trying to catch new information.

It sits on a wooden stand, which makes it easier for a person to use because the encyclopedia really is that gigantic. It has to be. Daddy says most encyclopedias come in sets—sometimes an entire book for just one letter of the alphabet—but this one holds everything from A to Z. And this reminds me of Sacred Heart and how it covers everything from preschool to high school.

The dictionary is not as big or fancy. Mama keeps it on a shelf in the cabinet with the glass door. It has a wonky brown cover that is starting to fall off, and Mama showed me how it has a spine. “Books are bodies too,” she said. “And the pages are the wings that make them fly.”

Mama has another dictionary—a little paperback she carries in her pocket. She checks off all the words she looks up. She uses a pencil. Check. This is the dictionary I use to look up “lure.”

lure: something that tempts or attracts with the promise of pleasure or reward.

The sky is now a darker violet, and the crickets are beginning to sing. Mama and I have been quiet for a long time. Once, I interrupted a quiet that was like this by saying, “It's too quiet,” and Mama said there was no such thing. She said love is the ability to be comfortable with others in silence. She made it seem like I didn't love her, and that made me want to cry.

“Did you hear that?” Mama says, and I'm glad she's the one to interrupt the silence. She was sitting, but now she's standing—and that makes me dizzy. She's leaning toward the woods where the wild trees grow along the ditch. She cups her ear with her hand. I listen too, but I don't hear anything. Mama stands there, her face twisted with worry, and I know she's hearing something—something I can't hear.

I listen hard.

I listen until I can't help but hear all the rustlings in the parts of the world gone black. The deep whispers below the cricket song. And then I hear the sound of something coming. All the tiny apples in the trees above turn into human eyes. They look around. At the woods, and then they look at me. They look sideways and they keep blinking.

My stuffed animals huddle close together. They wrap their fuzzy arms around one another and don't reach for me. I pull myself up and go to Mama, but she only puts one arm around me even though I need both arms to feel safe.

She's using her other hand to listen, and her eyes dart back and forth like the eyes in the trees. I nose my way into Mama's shawl, trying to hide inside her, but she is too thin and there is no room for me. She tightens her grip on my shoulder, and I try to hide from how much this hurts.

“Run!” Mama screams. “Now, Fig ! Run!”

And she takes my hand, and we are running. There is no time to grab my stuffed animals or even shout for them to run as well. Mama's bigger, and she can go much faster.

I make us trip and fall.

Mama has to stop again and again to pull me up. And then we're running again. And now we're coming into the front yard—through the cottonwoods and the long shadows of the cottonwoods—into the yard, where the grass is short and less wild because it is cut grass, but Mama doesn't stop. She lets go and I fall, and now she's on the porch, still screaming for me to run.

“Now, Fig, now!”

I am crying. I cry the way I cry when I cannot stop.

Why won't Mama come and get me? Where is Daddy? I want him to come home—to swoop down and pick me up with big strong arms and carry me inside, where the walls will make it safe again. But Daddy isn't here and Mama won't stop screaming. She keeps pointing at the shapes behind me where dark and light draw a line of safe and not safe. She screams and points at the world on the other side of the tall trees. At the shapes that stop moving whenever I turn to look.

*  *  *  *

“Are you any warmer?” the policeman asks. The one who wrapped me in a blanket.

The policeman sits in Daddy's armchair but doesn't lean back the way Daddy does. And he doesn't put his feet on the coffee table.

I'm sitting on the sofa, and Marmalade is next to me. She is next to me only because she was already there whenever it was that I sat down—I know this even if I don't remember sitting, or how I got inside. The cat is curled into herself, and every once in a while she twitches her tail. This is how Marmalade reminds me not to touch her. The cat doesn't like anyone but Mama.

The policeman sits on the edge of the chair like he's ready to pull his gun at any sign of danger. I try not to stare at the gun. It scares me. The policeman is younger than Daddy. His uniform is brown, and he keeps his hat in his lap. It's the same kind of hat worn by the bad man in
Curious George
, only brown instead of yellow. I hate the bad man with the yellow hat because he is always capturing George. Mama taught me how “capture” and “catch” have the same meaning. The bad man with the yellow hat captures George and takes him away from the jungle.

He takes George away from a world where he belongs.

I want to ask if the policeman saw my stuffed animals in the orchard, but I don't. We both pretend we aren't trying to listen to the conversation in the kitchen, where the other policeman is talking to Mama. They've been in there a long time. I can't tell what they are saying. They talk in hushed grown-up voices—interrupted only by the ticking of the grandfather clock.

“Don't be scared,” my policeman says. Then he tries asking again. “Exactly what did you see?” he says, but I shrug. I have no idea what I saw. I'm not good at talking, especially not to strangers. Strangers and talking make my throat feel weird. I sit very still, and I don't say anything.

It sounds like Mama is crying, and this makes my policeman stand. He puts his hat on the coffee table before walking toward the kitchen without actually going in there. He checks on them from a distance, but he keeps looking back at me like he's worried I'll disappear if he doesn't keep looking. He turns, about to head back to Daddy's chair, when something in the dining room catches his eye. And now he's poking around in there instead. He circles the table where Mama works on her art—the same table where Daddy ate all his childhood meals. Except for Thanksgiving or Christmas, we never eat in the dining room. We always eat in the kitchen, even when we have company, which we almost never do.

There is a pile of broken china dolls on the table and a large coil of rusted barbed wire. The power drill is charging. The tiny red light blinks on and off in the semidarkness. There's a spool of copper wire and a wooden box full of pliers, wire cutters, hammers, and tin snips.

Mama has been making mobiles to hang around the farm, only she calls them dream catchers. She hangs them in the barn and from the trees—wherever she thinks they'll look pretty. They remind me of cobwebs. Caught inside the webs of copper wire are quartz crystals. They dangle amid the arms, legs, and faces of the broken dolls.

My policeman looks at the encyclopedia. It is still open from me looking up Newfoundland dogs, which is the kind of dog the Darlings had in
Peter Pan
. The nanny dog. The policeman picks up the magnifying glass—the one I left out. I broke the rule, and rules are important. I forgot to put the magnifying glass away. It is always supposed to go back inside the special black velvet bag to keep it from breaking into a million pieces or starting fires. Mama's parents died in a fire. This is just one reason my birth was bittersweet. Mama never got to show me off to her mother and father.

I want to take the magnifying glass away from him, but I don't. That would be rude. Instead, I hold my breath and cross my fingers to keep the magnifying glass safe. He brings the glass to his eye and then pulls it away. He does this again—back and forth—and as he does he never stops looking through the glass. And I have to keep holding my breath and crossing my fingers because he won't put it down. He brings the magnifying glass to his face and looks at me. The eye behind the glass is big and bulging and no longer matches his other eye.

I hold my breath in a way where he can't know. And my fingers are crossed inside the cave of the blanket he wrapped around my body. He looks at me through the magnifying glass, and I know he is only trying to be funny. I should laugh. I think about what it would be like to laugh right now. To be the little girl little girls are supposed to be. But he gives up just as I'm about to try.

Holding my breath and crossing my fingers works: He puts the magnifying glass on the encyclopedia, walks into the living room, and sits back down in my father's armchair. He doesn't pick up his hat. He leaves it on the coffee table between the two piles of Mama's art books. He leaves his hat on top of my three new library books.

His hat hides
The Headless Cupid
—the book Mama let me check out even though she said I was too young for it. “The book is supposed to be a little scary,” Mama warned, but I promised not to be afraid. Mama looked at me and bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay, Fig, but only if we read it together.” And this is what we were supposed to do tonight before I went to bed. We should be upstairs in my bedroom reading
The Headless Cupid
right now instead of talking to the police.

*  *  *  *

I see the look Mama's policeman gives my policeman when he walks into the living room. Mama follows him—wringing her hands and biting her lip. She walks slow and looks confused. My policeman gets up, but then he stands the way I do when I'm waiting for a grown-up to tell me what to do. He starts for the door only after the other policeman does.

Before they leave, Mama's policeman stops and turns around. He pulls something from his shirt pocket and hands it to Mama. He calls her Mrs. Johnson, and I hold my breath and cross my fingers because Mama hates to be called Mrs.
Anything
. “My name is Annie” is what she usually says, but tonight she doesn't say anything at all. She just takes the piece of paper and looks at it.

She doesn't seem to understand.

“If anything else happens,” Mama's policeman says, “call that number and they'll dispatch us straightaway.”

My policeman puts his brown hat back on and winks at me, but he doesn't wink as well as Uncle Billy. Then he starts to turn the doorknob but changes his mind. Letting go, he squeezes his hand into a fist, and then he stretches all his fingers out again. He is watching me. Mama's policeman looks annoyed, like he just wants to go, but my policeman turns to Mama.

“Maybe there's someone you could call?” he asks. “Someone you two could stay with until your husband gets back?”

Mama shakes her head. “We'll be fine,” she says, but her voice doesn't sound like Mama. It's too high. She apologizes for making them come all the way out here, and I'm relieved because she isn't going to call Gran, who is the only person we have to call. And I do not want to stay with her. I never have and I never will, but just in case, and because it's already worked twice in one night, I hold my breath and cross my fingers.

The policemen close the door behind them, and Mama wanders back into the kitchen. Marmalade stands, stretching. Then she jumps off the sofa and follows Mama.

I start to follow Mama too, but then I remember the magnifying glass and the important rule about putting it away. I head toward the dining room, and that's when I hear Mama's policeman laughing. Through the window in the door, I can see them on the porch. They are wavy through the old glass. They're getting ready to go down the steps, but Mama's policeman laughs so hard, he has to stop and grab the railing. His laughter seems to make my policeman nervous; my policeman turns to check the house, then he looks through the same window I am looking through, but I am quick—I duck behind the wall, and he doesn't see me.

Mama's policeman stops laughing long enough to call Mama crazy. “She said there were goddamn dingoes out there.”

And I think of the program Mama watched last night. The one about the missing baby girl.

“On the eve of what would have been Azaria Chamberlain's second birthday,” the newsman said, “we bring you the latest in the murder trial of the century.”

First they showed a picture of the tiny baby in her mother's arms. Even though she was dressed in white, they made a big deal about a black and red baby dress.

“Not suitable,” they said. “Not for a child.” There was no baby in the dress they were discussing.

“The Chamberlains are Seventh-day Adventist,” the man went on, “And according to an anonymous tip, the name ‘Azaria' means ‘sacrifice in the wilderness.' ”

When they showed the baby's mother, Mama sucked in her breath and bit her lip. The other mother had a funny accent. Again and again, they showed her saying, “A dingo took my baby.” But when I asked Mama what a dingo was, she looked at me like I had startled her, and then she said it was time for me to go to bed.

Their voices change, which means the police are walking away, so I unwrap myself from behind the wall and slide across the hardwood in my socks to crouch by the door. There is a slot in the door even though we have to get our mail from the box on the highway. I push the slot open to watch them walk toward their car, and now I can hear them better.

“Maybe it was coyotes,” my policeman says, but he doesn't say “coyotes” the way Mama does. He makes the word rhyme with “boats” instead.

Mama's policeman laughs again. “ ‘A dingo took my baby,' ” he says, but then I can't hear them anymore—just the sound of car doors slamming, the engine turning over, and a car driving away, tires crunching gravel. I listen until all I hear are crickets. I close my eyes and watch them rub their legs together until their black bodies turn into tiny violins.

I put the magnifying glass away, but before I go into the kitchen I flip back to
d
.

dingo: a free-roaming wild dog unique to the continent of Australia, mainly found in the outback.