Penpal (12 page)

The fact that there were so many trashcans lining the neighborhood road told me that garbage day was somewhere nearby on the calendar, and when I lifted the lid to Josh’s trashcan and saw it filled with garbage bags, I was relieved that the day hadn’t already come. I hesitated for a second – taking a last look at the lizard on my shirt – then shoved the clothes underneath one of the bags and crept back around the house and through Josh’s bedroom window.

We sat in silence for a while, and it started to become uncomfortable. Finally, to break the quiet in the room, I asked him about the big bag in my old house and if it really moved – he said he couldn’t be sure. He kept apologizing about dropping the walkie-talkie at the house, but obviously that wasn’t a big deal, all things considered. We didn’t go to sleep that night. Instead, we sat peering out the window, waiting for the man with the bag, but he never came. We agreed to never tell anyone about what happened – no good would come from that. After a couple of hours, the sun pushed the darkness out of the sky, and my mom came to get me a couple of hours after that.

She asked me about the clothes I had on, and I told her that Josh had liked the shirt I had been wearing and asked if he could borrow it. She said that was nice of me. As we were pulling out of Josh’s driveway, my eyes lingered on the trashcan at the edge of their yard, and I caught myself whispering, “I thought I closed the lid …” I considered that the garbage truck might have just put the trashcan down with the lid open, but it didn’t matter. The evidence was gone, and I breathed easy.

Until very recently, my mother didn’t know about what Josh and I had done that night. Of course, I spared many of the details when I told her, but I thought that if I told her something she didn’t know, maybe she would reciprocate. By the end of the story, my mother’s eyes had glossed over. I asked her why she lied about bothering the new owners to stop me from going when there weren’t any new owners at all – why had she tried so hard to stop me from going back to our old
home? She
became irate and hysterical, and told me to get out of her house, but I just sat there, waiting.

When she realized that I wouldn’t leave, she sat back down, and she answered my question. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it harder than I thought her capable of and locked her eyes to mine. She whispered through clenched teeth as if she was afraid of being overheard:

“Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for Boxes. You think you were the only one to find them there? Don’t you tell me that I lied to you about there being someone in that house,
goddamn
you.”

I felt dizzy. With those few sentences, I understood so much. I understood why she had looked so uneasy after she brought Boxes out from under the house on our last day there; she found more than spiders or a rat’s nest that day. I understood why we left almost two weeks early. I understood why she tried to stop me from going back.

She knew. She knew he made his home under ours, and she kept it from me, and as I walked out of her house, I could only think of what else she might know. I left my mother that night without saying another word. I didn’t finish the story for her, but I want to finish it here, for you.

When I got home from Josh’s house that day, I threw my stuff on the floor, and it scattered everywhere; I didn’t care, I just wanted to sleep. I woke up around nine o’clock that night to the sound of Boxes’ meowing. My heart leapt. He had finally come home. I was a little sick about the fact that if I had just waited a day, none of the previous night’s events would have happened and I’d have Boxes anyway, but that didn’t matter; he was back. I got off my bed and called for him – looking around to catch a glint of light off his eyes. The crying continued, and I followed it. It was coming from under the bed. I laughed a little thinking I had just crawled under a house looking for him and how this was so much better. His meows were being muffled by a jacket, so I flung it aside and smiled, yelling, “Welcome home, Boxes!”

His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie.

Boxes never came home.

Maps

Most old cities and the neighborhoods in them weren’t planned in anticipation of a tremendous population growth. Generally speaking, the layout of the roads is originally in response to geographical restrictions and the necessity of connecting points of economic importance. Once the connecting roads are established, new businesses and roads are positioned strategically along the existing skeleton, and eventually the paths carved into the earth are immortalized in asphalt, leaving room only for minor modifications, additions, and alterations, but rarely a dramatic change.

If that is true, then my childhood neighborhood must have been old. If straight lines move “as the crow flies,”
then my neighborhood must have been built based on the travels of a snake. The first houses would have been placed around the lake, I’m sure, and while older, these houses were the nicest in the neighborhood. Gradually, the inhabitable area increased as new extensions were built off the original path, but these new extensions all ended abruptly at one point or another. All the neighborhood streets converged into a single strip of pavement that connected with the road into town; this was the only legitimate way either in or out of the neighborhood. A tributary, which both fed and drank from the lake, limited many of these extensions as it bifurcated the woods before passing right by The Ditch.

Many of the original homes had enormous yards, but some of those original plots, and all of the later lots, had been divided, leaving properties with smaller and smaller boundaries. An aerial view of my neighborhood would give one the impression that an enormous squid had once died in the woods, only to be found by some adventuring entrepreneur who paved roads over its tentacles, withdrawing his involvement to leave time, greed, and desperation to divide up the land between the roads among prospective home-owners like an embarrassing attempt at the Golden Ratio.

Our house was on a small rectangle of land, but we had a front and back yard. This was a luxury that would be eliminated over time as there were some residents who shared patches of land that were as big as the one upon which my house was placed. Even still, developers were carting in and assembling new modular homes, and families were continuing to park their trailer-homes on smaller and smaller lots; the neighborhood had been undergoing this expansion for a long time.

From my porch, you could see the old houses that surrounded the lake, and while these were all beautiful, the house of Mrs. Maggie was my favorite. It was an off-white, colonial-style house, though it was more modest than what that style typically offers. There was only one story, though a trinity of false windows extending off the lowest part of the roof convinced me that there were at least two. Her porch wrapped around her house all the way to the back where it grew an appendage that moved down a slightly sloping hill and became a dock once it settled on the water.

Like many of the yards with nicer homes on them, Mrs. Maggie’s had a sprinkler system that was on a timer; though at some point over the years, her timer must have broken because the sprinklers would come on at various points during the day, and often even at night, all year. While it never got cold enough to snow where I lived, several times each winter I would go outside in the morning to see Mrs. Maggie’s yard transformed into a surreal arctic paradise by the frozen water from her sprinklers.

Every other yard stood sterilized and arid by the biting frost of the winter’s cold, but right there in the middle of the bleak reminder of the savagery of the season was an oasis of beautiful ice, hanging like stalactites from every branch of every tree and every leaf of every bush. As the sun rose, its light spread through her trees, and each piece of ice splintered the rays into a rainbow that could only be viewed briefly before it blinded you. Even as a child, I was struck by how beautiful it was, and often Josh and I would go over there to walk on the iced grass and have sword fights with the icicles.

Mrs. Maggie was, as best as I can remember, around eighty years old, and was one of the friendliest and sweetest people I had ever met, despite her quirks. She had a head of loose-set white curls and always wore light dresses with floral patterns over her frail, but not sickly, body. When it was warm and Josh and I would go swimming in the lake, she would sit out on her back porch and just talk with us. She never brought a book or a magazine, never had a crossword puzzle or a word-search; I think she came out on those days just to visit.

Sometimes we would swim out nearly to the center of the oval lake, and she would call us back, yelling not to swim too far, but we never listened. When we played close to the shore, she would ask us about school, and any time we told her what we were learning or what assignments we had, she would say that we should be thankful because she always had to work harder when she was our age. I once told her that we were building a spaceship; Mrs. Maggie said that we were getting off easy.

While the last weeks of kindergarten played out, Josh and I found ourselves in the lake nearly every weekend, and so nearly every weekend Mrs. Maggie found herself out on her porch. The Community group was wrapping up the Balloon Project, and on the day that we took our last pictures home, Josh had come to play at my house after school. Though the initial enthusiasm for the project had long since abated, taking all the Polaroids off the map and bringing them home had stirred the embers of our dwindling excitement.

When we were swimming in the lake that day, Josh asked how far I thought a letter might go if we put it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean. We guessed at this until Mrs. Maggie, who was eavesdropping, interjected and said that it would depend on which ocean it was and what the currents were like. She said, as she gestured toward the tributary, that we could even throw it into the lake and it might travel hundreds of miles.

I asked her if she thought the bottle would go farther than a balloon, and she looked at me quizzically as if she expected me to elaborate. I thought she already knew about the Balloon Project; I thought I had explained it to her before, but I told her about it anyway. She said that she had never heard of an experiment exactly like that, and that it sounded wonderful. Her husband, Tom, was a pilot, and she joked that if one of our balloons had been caught on the wing of his plane, it could have ended up on the other side of the world.

Mrs. Maggie said that Tom should be home any day and that she would ask him if he saw any balloons in the sky while he was flying. She was smiling so cheerfully that I didn’t want to upset her by pointing out that she had already told us that joke months ago.

When Josh and I started paddling toward the shore, Mrs. Maggie invited us in for snacks. This was fairly routine; she would laugh and say that she had made too much food or lemonade and would gesture enthusiastically for us to walk up the dock and onto her porch. It was a tempting offer, especially when it was hot outside or we had tread water for too long, but we would always decline as politely as young boys knew how; Mrs. Maggie wasn’t a stranger, but despite how kind she was, we were never comfortable enough with her to accept her invitation. I don’t know what Josh’s reservations were, exactly, but mine began the day I met Mrs. Maggie.

The first time I met her was the first time my mother let me walk home from the bus stop by myself. For the first few weeks of kindergarten, my mom had made arrangements with her employer to pick me up from school, but this meant that to make up for the lost time, she would have to leave me at our house alone for about an hour each day. We didn’t live very far from my elementary school, but the lines to pick up the students were always long; so long, in fact, that the students who rode the bus would often make it back to their houses before we made it back to ours.

Eventually my mom relaxed enough to let me ride the bus, and she would meet me with her car where the bus dropped me off. Many of the other kids that shared my bus stop, however, had their own keys to their houses, and I would get into my mom’s car and watch them run and skip home with their keys dangling around their necks or swinging from their hands. This made me jealous.

I pleaded with my mom to let me travel as freely as the other kids did, and gradually her reflexive dismissal wavered, and we reached a compromise. She gave me a key to the front door and attached it to a black rope lanyard; I wore it around my neck and felt that there was barely anything left to distinguish me from adults at that point.

About a month or so into kindergarten, I rode the bus home as usual, but kept one foot in the aisle this time. I was going to use my key for the first time, and we were nearing my stop. The bus braked, and I was first to stand as I waited for the driver to let us out. I poured out of the bus with the other kids that shared my stop and could see my mom waiting for me on the porch in the distance. As I closed the gap and passed the house that sometimes transformed into an ice palace, I met Mrs. Maggie.

“Chris?”

I didn’t turn and barely even noticed the voice.

“Chris! It
is
you!”

Turning to my left, I saw a thin old woman hustling across her lawn, her floral-patterned dress billowing in the warm summer air. I looked to my right and then behind me, but I was the only person in the street. She was calling to
me
. I started walking faster, but my confusion had slowed my pace, and she caught up with me with her careful but quick steps.