No Book but the World: A Novel (13 page)

I commiserate with a like
tsk
, glad to find myself an ally of her disapproval rather than its target. She wears pale blue slacks, a pale pink sweater, and over these, an apron of yellow gingham. Outside the kitchen window the day looks as though it’s been drawn with a crayon, the sky bright and scrubbed, the branches stiff at attention.

While I eat, she sips her coffee and leans against the counter, watching the bulbous little TV. It’s showing the local news again, which makes me uneasy, but they’re only airing a segment on how to buy your Thanksgiving turkey. We watch together as the reporter visits first a turkey farm, then a farmers’ market, then a large chain store. The segment ends with the anchorwoman back in the studio ribbing the on-location reporter about how he seems to be developing a little wattle himself, and as they go to commercial Mrs. Tremblay says, “I never like it when they do that.”

I have never liked this either, the spiky banter, the false jocosity that seems to be the lingua franca of commercial news operations. I feel an unexpected glimmer of kinship with Mrs. Tremblay.

“Coffee?” she asks.

“Please.”

Refilling my cup, she says, “You met my nephew,” and for an instant I wonder whether she could possibly be Bayard Charles’s aunt.

“I did?”

“You had a little trouble coming around the bend by Vincy Hill, I hear.” Does she sound almost mischievous, letting this drop?

“Oh! That was your nephew? The man who stopped?” I try to remember his face, tucked back in the recesses of his hood. The spots of rain on his eyeglasses. “He was so nice. I didn’t get his name.”

“Ayuh. That was Bill.” Now she’s back at the counter, wiping it with a rag.

“How did he know who I was—or that you—?”

“Oh, well. Perdu’s awful small.”

I let that sink in. Impossible to tell, looking at her narrow shoulders and broad bottom as she rinses out the rag, wrings it forcefully and hangs it over the faucet, if she means this statement to be taken at face value or to suggest something more.

I thank Mrs. Tremblay for breakfast and try to carry my own dishes to the sink, but she intercepts me (“Oh, now. I’ll do that”), removing them from my hands, and so I thank her again and excuse myself. I have just reached the doorway when the anchor says: “An update now on the death of young James Ferebee, the twelve-year-old boy who was found last Saturday in Meurtriere State Forest,” and I cannot now leave without hearing what follows, even if this will give me away to Mrs. Tremblay once and for all. I turn back. She gives me a look. Then we both turn our attention to the screen.

“The boy had been missing for five days when rescuers found him unconscious in a creek bed seven miles from the nearest trailhead. He was brought to Criterion Regional Medical Center where medical staff declared him dead late Saturday night. Today, according to a spokesman from the District Attorney’s office, the medical examiner’s report ruled the cause of death to be cerebral hypoxia, a lack of oxygen to the brain. The report concludes the death was precipitated by an asthma attack triggered by the cold, wet environment in which the boy was found.”

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Natural causes. The cold is to blame, the cold and the wet. Not Fred. Surely, whatever Fred did, whatever minor misjudgment he might have made in bringing the boy with him to the woods, things will go easier for him now.

The anchor continues. “The report also revealed evidence of a broken wrist, two broken ribs and contusions on the boy’s face, torso and legs, all of which point to what appears to have been a harrowing series of hours, if not days, leading up to his death. Investigators are still working to piece together what took place between the time James Ferebee was seen riding in a car just blocks from his middle school in Perdu last Monday afternoon and the time he was found, five days later, clinging to life in Meurtriere State Forest. Friends of the family say that Frederick Robbins”—here the image cuts to Fred’s mug shot, and it is as jolting as the first time I saw it: the severity not only of his hair cropped so close to the skull but also of his gaunt face, as if his skin, too, were hunkering close to the bone—“the thirty-year-old vagrant being held on charges of abduction, had spent weeks cultivating the boy’s trust, often inviting him into the garage apartment”—and here the image cuts to an exterior shot of the place where Fred had supposedly been staying since late summer: a listing, brownish, aluminum-sided building, with a corrugated metal garage door dominating the front, no visible windows, and an exterior staircase leading to the second floor—“on the lot adjacent to the boy’s home, where Robbins had been temporarily staying.”

The camera pulls back to show the lot in which the garage stands, then pulls back farther to show a dark green ranch house, separated from the junkyard by a cyclone fence: presumably the Ferebee abode.

Fred has spent so much of the last decade in reaches unknown to me. I have never visited him in any of the places he has traveled. He has never invited me. Nor have I tried, I realize, staring at Mrs. Tremblay’s old TV, to envision him in his surroundings. When he was working on the maple syrup farm, I did picture him collecting a bucket of sap from a tapped tree, knee deep in blue-white snow, but the image I conjured was as pristine and idealized as an illustration in one of our old children’s books.

When he was working on the lobster boat, I remember imagining lobsters in their wooden traps and a boat riding spangled waves, but never him; I gave no thought to where he stayed or how he lived or who he interacted with or what they made of him. Same with the painting gig on Cape Cod: I know he stayed in Dave Alsop’s house, but not how big it was or how close to the beach, or if anyone else lived there, or what he did with his free time. I don’t even know if it was a house, come to think of it, or an apartment or a trailer.

Once I asked June how she could stand it.

Fred had been twenty-two that fall, working in a salmon cannery in Kodiak, Alaska. I’d been up visiting my parents for the day. It was after lunch. Neel had gone off to take a nap, and June and I sat on the gray flowered couch having tea. Her box of stationery was on the coffee table, and I could see she’d started a letter to Fred in her beautiful, clear handwriting. Fred, of course, was no letter writer; she must have known he would not respond.

“Stand what?” she asked.

I tried to think what exactly I meant. Letting Fred go away, solo, into the immensity of an impartial world. Or rather, an all-too-partial world, a world that looked askance at the likes of Fred.

“Worrying,” I said finally. “Don’t you worry about him?”

“Ava.” She pulled my arm very gently so that my hand came away from the earring I’d been twisting around in its hole. “If I thought worrying would help—if I thought there was even the slightest chance that my worrying would help Fred, I’d do it.”

“But how do you know he’ll be all right?”

Even as I asked, I knew the answer: she didn’t. She and Neel had never known he would be all right, not during all those far-off days of childhood when he’d gone roving in the woods behind the cottages; not during the terrible long hours he’d sat in a classroom in Freyburg Primary, holding back tears, holding in the rhythms his hands wanted badly to tap on his desktop, holding off the stares and whispers of his classmates; not, for that matter, during the afternoons he’d spent lost with me up on the flowered couch, following my orders (“Get us some books, Freddy boy,” “Breathe with your mouth shut”) while I entranced him with stories of peril and pleasure, wound him round and round with my voice, led him down a branching path.

Now the TV is showing something else: a middle-aged woman in a down vest standing on the porch of the dark green house. “It’s a tragedy,” she rasps. “A wicked shame. He shouldn’ta died and that’s all. The family don’t even care what happens to the guy who did it. Nothing’s going to bring Jimmy back.” A caption at the bottom of the screen identifies her as FAMILY FRIEND. The camera pulls back then to show the front door behind her, with a quick glimpse of a face peering out through the side panel, before cutting to the studio where the anchorwoman announces, “As the family continues to mourn, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s office says the investigation into the events that led to the boy’s death will continue. In related news, we’ve just been told that the Arthur L. Humphrey Middle School will dismiss students one hour early today to accommodate those families and teachers planning to attend a public memorial service this afternoon.”

Floating in the upper right-hand corner of the screen during this wrap-up is the boy’s by now ubiquitous school photo. Round face like a bowl of cream, dark eyes and dark hair and those protuberant incisors, hinting at the beginnings of a grin. A ready face, a game face. The face of one who will be led.

T
HAT FIRST YEAR
the Manseaus lived at Batter Hollow, Kitty and Freddy and I spent countless unstructured hours in Midgetropolis. We never told the grown-ups about our special place, never even uttered its name in their presence. “Want to go to M?” one of us would say softly, and we’d automatically drop whatever we’d been doing. Its magical properties grew and bound us to the place. I remember I’m the one who declared offhandedly, one December day as we approached the spot, “You can only get there through the Arch,” and thus named the opening at the base of the two bent pines whose crowns came together. It was a fresh, chilly morning, the air tasting of tinsel, and we were well bundled in layers borrowed from the steamer trunk that had once been the school lost-and-found. Kitty and Freddy slipped through the opening between the trees after me, and from that day on we never entered Midgetropolis by any other route.

Already we’d begun seeing differently. There was a fat old lightning-struck stump that rose majestically from the forest floor, its splintered edges like crenellations, the white fungi that decorated its rim like heraldic pennants: this was quite plainly the Tower. One or another of us would climb up into it to serve as lookout or issue an edict; occasionally I’d stand up there and tootle my recorder like a medieval bugler signaling the start of a joust. There was a trio of sprawling, flattish, mossy rocks clustered down by the swale: these were our Thrones, richly upholstered in emerald velvet, each with a matching footstool. And the
HOAGMAN APOC SAFE SPIRITS
bottle became our Ark—this was what Kitty said you called the container for something sacred, in our case, a broad scrap of pale bark I had peeled, naughtily, from one of the silver birch trees, and on which Kitty this day inscribed a kind of oath:
WE PROMISE TO DEADICATE ARSELVES TO THE LAND OF MIJATROPOLIS AND KEEP IT SECRET FOREVER NO MATTER WHAT HAPENS
.

I helped dictate, and when it was done Kitty capped the felt-tip pen she’d brought and stuck it in the pocket of her peacoat. Then she withdrew from this same pocket a sewing needle stuck through a scrap of cloth and a book of matches. She displayed these on the flat of her palm and looked at Freddy and me with cheeks sucked solemnly in.

“Now,” she explained, “we sign it in blood.” She slipped the needle from its cloth.

We sat cross-legged on our Thrones, knee to knee to knee. Above us rose the pines, tall and muscular in their dark prickly coats. Above them the sky was drumskin white.

“First I’ll kill the germs,” Kitty announced, lighting a match and sticking the tip of the needle in the flame. She said we could start with me: pointer or thumb? I gave her my left thumb.

I was not happy about any of it: not her having sprung this on us; not her rather imperious manner; not her decision to start with me; and above all, not her having had the idea in the first place. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the idea. I was only afraid I’d never come up with an idea so good, so daring. What if Kitty found me dull or timid, unworthy of her friendship; what if she was growing tired of me?

So while she poked and pushed at the pad of my thumb for what seemed whole minutes, hurting me without managing to pierce the skin, I sat clenching my teeth and screwing up my eyes, determined not to make a sound. Finally she jabbed the needle in. I gave a little scream and opened my eyes. She squeezed and a drop of blood welled to the surface.

“Parchment,” she demanded, holding out her hand toward Freddy, who was holding the birch bark oath.

At six, Freddy continued to be big for his age. He sat there on the flat rock with his legs crossed and his bare ankles sticking out from too-short tan corduroys and his hooded parka ringing his face with fake fur. His face was awash in tears. I was used to seeing Freddy cry—at that stage tantrums were a daily occurrence—but I had never seen him cry like this: silently, without histrionics or facial contortions, only a swollen softness, an overflowing sorrow that fed not on self-pity but seemed to tap deeper springs. He was crying for me.

“Parchment,” Kitty repeated, apparently unaware that there was anything different about these tears.

They were an astonishment to me, the first evidence of empathy I’d ever seen in Freddy. In fact, I had worried about the way he sometimes seemed not merely unmoved but actually titillated when someone got hurt. Only a few days earlier, a bird had smashed into the kitchen window while we were eating lunch, and Freddy had laughed and flapped his wrists in excitement.

With an impatient sound now, Kitty snatched the piece of bark from his hand and rolled it against my pricked thumb, where the bright red bead had already almost dried. It left a rusty smudge.

Freddy gave a loud sniff and wiped his tears with the heels of both hands.

“If you’re going to be a baby,” Kitty said calmly, “you can’t be in Midgetropolis.”

“Yes he can,” I contradicted. “He discovered it.”

“We all did.”

“He found the kettle. He found the floor.”

We looked over at the stone slab upon which we’d erected our Midgetropolis house. Even in the midst of bickering, I knew we were all seeing it as we’d spun it out in our imaginations, and in language: its walls and wide hearth, its thatched roof and clay chimney pot, its flower boxes filled with marigolds and blue front door on which hung a brass knocker—all of this uniquely apparent to the three of us.

“Fine,” Kitty huffed. “But if he doesn’t put his blood on the parchment, he’s not part of the oath.”

I looked at Freddy. He’d stopped crying but along his jaw a few drops still clung like rain on the underside of a railing. I reached over and flicked them off.

“All right,” I said, “but you go next. Show him it’s not so bad.”

With some bravado Kitty lit another match and re-sterilized the needle. Then she tried to prick her own finger, jabbing experimentally for even longer than it had taken her to puncture my skin. She couldn’t do it.

“Want me to?” I held out my hand for the needle.

“Wait,” she said, hunching protectively. “It’s just harder to do on yourself.”

“That’s why I said you want me to?”

“No, I can, it’s just . . .” She angled herself away and I got on my knees so I could peer over her shoulder.

“You’re doing it wrong,” I suggested. “You’re trying to go in sideways. It’s not like getting a splinter out.”

“You’re too close,” she countered. “I can’t see and you’re getting your breath all over the needle. Now I have to burn off the germs again.”

But she had another inspiration. She pulled up the leg of her jeans, exposing a little scab on her knee, which she picked off. Blood seeped to the surface. She blotted it with the piece of bark, and her mark came out better than mine.

“That’s cheating.”

“Blood is blood,” she replied. And to Freddy: “Now you.”

“No-ah needle,” he said.

We helped him search for available scabs, practically stripping him: we pulled up the legs of his tan cords, took off his parka, pushed back the arms of his sweater. “Check his toes,” suggested Kitty, and we removed his sneakers and socks, to no avail. “We’ll have to prick you then,” decided Kitty. “What finger do you want?”

“I do-ah,” said Freddy. “I!
I-ah
.” Striking his chest.

He scrambled off his Throne. Coatless, shoeless, sockless, he went stepping in the December woods along the muddy swale, the surface of which bore a lacy veil of ice, and plucked a jagged stone. Then he sat right down in layers of wet leaves and applied the stone’s sharp edge to the smooth, flat plane of his inner arm, scraping and scraping back and forth.

It took him some time. Up and down the white limb he scraped, coolly, as though the arm were unattached to him or to anyone, as though it were inert, a piece of wood. He did not look up until he was done, until he had drawn blood. Then he tossed the stone away in the leaves, idly, without show, with no special force or flourish, and this seemed to me the crowning oddity, although I couldn’t have said why.

He climbed back up beside us, offering the part of his arm where a little zipper of scarlet had risen up through a length of white-flaked skin, and I tried to catch his eye but his head was bent. Kitty pressed the birch bark to the wound, then pulled it back and showed us. Three spots of blood marked the parchment oath.

I looked at Freddy, who had surprised me twice in the space of ten minutes, first by weeping for me, then by displaying so little regard for his own pain. Now he was far from the trembling tears he’d wept for me; far, too, from the intense focus he’d shown while abrading the skin of his own arm. His eyes looked flat, vacant. His bare feet had gone bluish.

“Put your socks back on,” I told him. “Where’d your jacket go?”

We helped him work the socks back over his frozen feet; we tied his shoelaces for him and retrieved his parka from where it had fallen. Kitty turned all motherly-efficient, brushing the wet leaves off his shoulders and telling him to lift his chin while she snapped his hood under it, so that I liked her again.

•   •   •

T
HAT EVENING
N
EEL,
keeping Freddy company while he had a bubble bath, said, “How’d you get that on your arm?” I was reading in my bedroom across the hall and heard them through the open doors as clearly as if we were all in the same room together. Freddy had been making
chuff chuff
noises as he propelled his wooden boat across the surface of the bath, and every now and then I’d hear Neel refold the pages of his newspaper, but now the toilet creaked and I could picture him leaning forward from where he sat on its closed lid.

Neel generally made a point of attaching little importance to physical injury. If one of us came crying to him with a bruise or cut, he was likely to inspect it briefly, tousle our hair, and remind us that
life is inseparable from risk
. So when he put aside his newspaper to inquire about Freddy’s arm, it got my attention.

“S’ah-scrape,” said Freddy.

“What’s that you say?”

“Ah-got s’ah-scrape.”

It was still difficult for most people, Neel and June included, to understand Freddy’s speech. By the time he turned ten, the problem had mostly resolved and only the habit of inserting extra vowels persisted. But for most of his first decade, I was the one who understood him best, and so ingrained was the habit of interpreting for him that I nearly called out from my bedroom, “He says he got a scrape!”

Instead I sat in wonder: Freddy had lied. For all his many failings, I had never known Freddy to be dishonest. In fact until that point I’d thought him incapable of deceit.

Later that evening, after Freddy had finished his bath, asked for and gotten a strawberry yogurt, flung it against the stove when told he had to sit at the table to eat it, spent fifteen minutes rolling himself back and forth across the floor, calmed down enough to go outside and look for the moon with Neel, then sat on June’s lap while he drank a cup of water, and finally been tucked into bed, I stole into his room.

“Are you awake?” I could hear him slurping on his thumb as he often did in his sleep.

But, “S’ah,” he answered, rolling onto his side and blinking shinily at me. I sat on the floor beside his bed where the moonlight fell in a thin channel.

“Did it hurt?” I whispered. “When you scraped yourself today?”

He returned my gaze so steadily that it prickled the base of my neck. For a moment I wondered if he was only pretending, all the rest of the time when he seemed unable to hold eye contact. After a moment he sighed.

He had a fairy-tale face, Freddy, a face of contrasts, pale and dark. He was sloe-eyed and slope-nosed and had a deeply bowed mouth. His breath often had a slightly sour scent that I associated with his thumb-sucking, but he had brushed his teeth before bed and now it just smelled of mint.

“Did it hurt when you went in the bath?” I pressed, thinking of times I’d had a scrape sting when it got wet.

He didn’t answer.

“Did it hurt?” I repeated, my whisper close to a hiss.

But he only blinked. I brought my face toward his, leaning closer and closer until our foreheads touched, and our noses, too, and he did not jerk away and we were inhaling and exhaling the same minty breath.

What I meant was:
Did I hurt you?
Did you have to make yourself bleed because you saw my finger get pricked?
And:
What else would you do for me?
And:
How responsible for you am I?