My Abandonment, page 16
My shoes are even tighter with the new wool socks. The sky is darker now so I carry everything with me as I head out to see what I can find and to do what I came here to do.
It's also funny to walk down the hills and onto the streets, back along through the neighborhood in the opposite direction but the same path as Father and I took that night when Della and I were sleeping on the trampoline. Walking now I keep expecting his shadow or the sound of his boots on the blacktop next to me. Still he could see how all this would happen and is trusting in me so it's not exactly like he's not here.
I pass the white brick wardhouse with its spire and all the rooms I know are in there. The big kitchen, the room full of folding metal chairs that can pinch your fingers, the basketball court, all the hymnbooks whose songs I know.
Dogs bark from behind wooden fences where I can't see them. Only their paws below or their snouts sticking through. Dogs bark from inside houses, standing on couches so their noses smear against the windows. I go past the old penitentiary, through Quarry View Park, slanting along toward Hill View, the street I'm after.
None of this feels like a place I've lived, not like I'm coming home. I'm on the sidewalk like a boy from another neighborhood with my go broncos cap and my backpack.
The trees we planted have grown up, at least two feet some of them though right now they have no leaves and look skinny. One day they'll be tall and strong enough to climb. It's been so long since I climbed a tree.
A new part has been built onto the top of my foster parents' house. It used to be yellow and now it's blue but it's the same house. The white car in the driveway is not our red stationwagon even if they could have gotten a different car, a new car. It could even be that they don't live in this house anymore which is fine if this is true since it was never my plan to ring the doorbell or to come back and be their daughter. It would be fine too if they knew how I turned out and were proud. They are not bad people even if the things they believe are unbelievable. They tried to hold on to me longer than they were supposed to, to make me be like them when I am not like them and have places to go.
I only wanted to walk past the house like this to show that I can and that it doesn't make me feel any special way. After all they are not the person I'm after.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will pass an invisible boundary. Don't forget this. Don't forget that thinking can get in the way. Forget the forgetting. We seek to forget ourselves, to be surprised and to do something without knowing how or why. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.
I went to Adams School all the way up to fourth grade. The brick is the same soft orange color as always and behind the school is the swimming pool that is hardly ever open and when it is the water is so cold you can't stand it. There's a twisting green plastic slide called the Hydrotube that you can see through. In the wading pool there are concrete sea lions you can climb on. Now like usually the water is drained and the gates are locked and there's no one in there.
I keep walking. Out in this playground I played four square and tetherball and soccer. I climbed these monkey bars and hung upside down so my hair swept the black rubbery ground. Now I wouldn't even go to this school anymore. I'd be in middle school, almost high school.
Where I'm standing I can see blackboards through the windows and sometimes a person's head, a teacher. I could probably remember the teachers' names. I know some of them are still here since some of the cars in the parking lot are the same: the tan and cream Suburban of Miss Larsen, the PE teacher's fancy red Jeep.
When the school bell rings you can hear it outside, across all the fields and all through the neighborhood.
At first all the tiny kids come out with bread bags sticking out the tops of their rubber boots and their mittens attached together with a piece of yarn stretched inside their coats and down the sleeves.
Then I see her, surrounded. Della. Her brown hair is lighter than it used to be and now she has curls that she never had before. She is ten years old and surrounded by laughing friends. She is taller than she was. I always was skinnier. Her books pressed into her chest, she shouts at some boys climbing a fence. Della is pretty, she was always prettier than me and followed the rules. They said I could learn from her, watch her. Still I wasn't a bad example when I was here and then I was gone. Now I am back and she can learn from me.
She talks to her friends next to the yellow school bus. When they get on she does not get on. Instead she watches the bus drive away with her friends waving in the windows and then she crosses the street and begins to walk.
A whole flock of little black birds keeps rising from the branches of one bare tree to settle in another for a moment before something startles them and they rise up and return to the first tree again. I am thirty feet from my sister, though she is walking away. I follow. I am not afraid, I am only trying to time it right. I want her to hear me and not be frightened. I want to tell her my new, real name. Little sister, I want to say, I know so much more now and I've come back to take you with me to be my friend. I can teach you. This where you are is not a bad place and these are not bad people but it's not where you're supposed to be. It is not who you're supposed to be with.
I follow on one side and she's on the other side of the street. I want to see her better but I can't seem to cross over and there are parked cars so I can only see her head sliding along. Her face never did look like mine, her earlobes attach differently. I used to wonder and ask Father if maybe our foster parents had gotten us separately and he says, "Oh, Caroline, you two are sisters. Don't be jealous like that. You'll always be my first girl now."
Now I can see Della's whole body, walking, and we are the only two people walking on this block with just the width of the slushy street between us. She doesn't look over at me. It's like she doesn't want to or doesn't recognize me or is afraid. I take off my stocking cap so my long two-colored hair is down but she doesn't know who I am. I almost wave and I almost call out her name but I do not. It's not since I'm afraid, afraid she won't remember. It's more that I don't want to wave, that I don't want her to remember. I see that now. I wanted to see her without being seen even if the plan has always been to come back for her with Father, the three of us. Now without him I don't know. I do know that I am not the same sister she had.
This girl across the street, her name is still Della. She smiles and laughs to herself as she walks like she's remembering something that happened at school or thinking ahead to where she is going. Her black shiny shoes slip a little on the icy sidewalk. She's not even in the same day as I am even if once we were sisters and shared a room. There's a way that I think she should know it's me if she's really my sister. To just feel that I am near, or to tell by how I walk or move that it's me. She even glances over across at me and then glances away. Nothing. I know I am not that same girl and now I really feel that and know that Father knew better than I did when we left her here, behind.
The pioneer cemetery is down Warm Springs from the elementary school and is surrounded by a black metal fence but the gate is not locked and swings open. I walk along the spaces between the headstones and not on the paths. I used to get in trouble for playing here during recess. Some of the stone crosses and angels and even the names are familiar. Some have settled into the ground and stand up crooked. That's a sad thing to see. Some have sunken down so far the grass is growing over.
There's footprints all around some graves but most of the graves are surrounded only by the white snow, smooth since no one has visited. Do dead people need their family to visit them or is it sometimes the other way around? Who gets lonelier?
There is a place here that I remember, that is under some tall trees where the parents of my foster parents are buried and where we sometimes took flowers. There's spaces there waiting for my foster parents and for Della and also for me even if that's a place I'll never be.
As I walk closer to this place I see that there are new stones. Maybe my foster parents have died while I was gone and then I think that maybe they gave up on me after I disappeared and they could not find me. I am thinking that maybe they even put up a stone for me with the ground beneath it empty and not dug up at all. I want to stand there by my stone with no body beneath my feet since the name carved into the stone would be the same name I wrote once on a slip of paper and put into the hole of Randy's stomach, to remind me of a name I will never forget but that I will never use again.
Under the trees though I cannot find the names I expected at all or the stones that I know. I brush off snow, I kick it off the names that are flat along the ground. This is not the right place or the graves have been moved around. No one's here. My feet are wet and cold again. The sky is getting darker. I walk to every cluster of trees and do the same thing but never find the names I thought I would find. It really doesn't matter, I hardly know why I'm searching. Finally I cross out the other side of the cemetery, past the little black birds that hop along the snow's crust without making any mark.
And then I see what I forgot, that East Middle School is right across the street from the cemetery and inside are the people my age who I knew and who I do not want to see now. I see instead a bus coming and I wave to the driver, feeling in my pockets for coins.
Rabbits and rodents are both mammals but a rabbit is not a rodent. They are part of a different family. A family is a fundamental social group typically consisting of a man and woman and their offspring. It can also be two or more people who share goals and values, have long term commitments to each other, and usually reside in the same dwelling place. Families are also a way like species and orders to organize how all kinds of animals are related to each other. A father is the male parent of an animal. Most animals have nervous systems, sense organs, and specialized modes of locomotion, and are adapted for securing, ingesting, and digesting food.
On my ride I don't see any blue ribbons on tree branches or car antennas or pinned to peoples' clothes. I have changed so much and learned so much it's like everyone is moving slower than I am and I can tell what they'll do next or even what they are thinking. Yes I'm sad to be alone but it's fun too or at least satisfying to see all that I can do for myself.
When I see the shopping mall I pull the cord and climb down. I'm crossing the parking lot and my shadow is long and thin, slanting away with my head rounded by the stocking cap. Then the black shadow of a crow slides along the pavement next to me, across me. It squawks and bends straight up a brick wall. I look into the sky and there's nothing there.
Fluorescent lights are not healthy for you and they are everywhere in the mall. I've been here before though and it's warm inside and the crowds make it safe, the open spaces that are not inside any store where people ask if they can help you. No one keeps track of you at the mall.
Mervyn's, J. C. Penney's, Mrs. Fields Cookies. They have stores of everything: caramel corn, teddy bears, jewelry, sunglasses. A fountain out in the middle where people throw coins into the water. Near there stands a tall fake candy cane and a throne and a sign for Santa Claus. He's not there. Christmas is almost a month away but the music is playing in the air.
I turn around. No one is looking at me even if it feels that way.
I have forgotten to eat, which is a mistake. Everything around me is a corn dog or hamburger. A&W Root Beer, McDonald's, Taco Time. I take three toothpicks of cheese from Pepperidge Farm, dig nuts out of the bag in my backpack. My legs are tired since my pack is heavy. The sleeping bag is light and rolls down small but there's also all the papers and Randy and the mammals book, Father's notebook and knives, the dictionary and the food. I want to set it down for a while so I sit down on a bench with it on the floor. I take out an apple and eat it while people walk past not looking at me.
Across from where I'm sitting is a sewing store and in the window fabric is all unrolled and hanging. One long piece is dark blue with yellow and orange birds swooping across it and squirrels down along the bottom. I almost forget my pack when I stand up to look closer.
The smallest piece of fabric I can buy is a yard which costs ten dollars. The lady who tells me this has thick eyeglasses and a measuring tape over the shoulders of her brown cardigan sweater.
"What are you making?" she says.
"I don't know," I say. The truth is I saw it and it made me happy.
"All right," she says. "Will there be anything else?"
"No," I say.
Once I watch her cutting the fabric and the silver scissors going through it I have another idea.
With the fabric folded in tissue paper inside my pack I go down the long back hallway until I find the women's restroom. I wash my face and in the stall I hang my coat. The stall door is made of steel and has initials and curse words scratched into it.
I wet the bottom of my T-shirt and back in the stall wipe it over myself and put on a clean shirt. The one I was wearing smells like smoke. Later I will change my underwear but first I take off my cap and wet my hair down. It smells like smoke too and the water brings out the smell. In my pack I find my broken off half of a comb and comb my hair straight down past my shoulders. The faucet is automatic when I put my hand there which is hard to learn and keeps starting and stopping.
There's mirrors on two walls at the corner of the sinks so I can see the front and side of my head at the same time. With my coat off Father's bracelets clink around my wrists so I take them off and stack them on the counter. I take his long sharp scissors from the oilskin case and it's easier to cut the left side of my hair than the right where I have to turn my hand upside down and can't exactly see the blades cutting. The bleached part of my hair goes from my ears down and my regular black hair is above. The line between them is uneven and a little blurry and that's what I follow. My hair will be all black again, just like it always was back in the forest park.
First I hear the door and then in the mirror I see the two girls coming in and standing behind me. One has red hair and freckles and is tall and the other shorter girl has blond hair. The first thing I do is take Father's bracelets off the counter and put them back on my wrist. These girls are about my age and they both wear headphones whose cords come out of a Walkman in the short girl's hand. They take off the headphones so they're not attached together but don't move apart or go into the stalls. They just stand there watching.
"What?" I say. "What is your problem?"
They step back a little without leaving.
"We saw you out in the mall," the tall girl says. "We followed you. At first because we thought you were a cute boy but then you went into the women's room so we wondered."
"I wanted you to think that," I say. "I knew you were following me."
We're talking to each other in the mirror. I haven't turned around. Our voices are loud with all that tile.
"She means," the short blond girl says, "that you could be a cute girl, too."
"I don't care what you think," I say.
"I was only trying to say something nice," she says.
"That's fake," I say.
For a while I keep cutting my hair and the girls keep watching me without saying anything. Then in the reflection I see the tall girl point at the floor:
"Look," she says. "This is bad. You're hurt."
"I'm fine," I say and I don't look down since it might be a trick and I don't want them to think I'll look where they say. Also I'm right at the tricky back part of my hair. I snip around to connect the lines of the right and left sides and then with my hand I sweep the cut hair off the counter and into the sink. I scoop it up to throw in the trash can.
When I look to pick up the hair on the floor I see what they were saying. There's smeared red on the yellow and tan tiles, blood tracked all around in the tread of my sneakers. It's red footprints walking over each other. The front of my left sneaker is red and wet.
I try not to let my face show anything. The girls just stand there still watching. "You're hurt."
"So what?" I say.
"Go get Mom," the short one says. "Right away."
The tall girl is gone, the door slapping.
"I'm fine by myself," I say even if now I don't feel fine. I pick up my pack and set it back down since it feels so heavy. I close my eyes for a moment and open them. The girl has stepped closer without me noticing.
"You're sisters?" I say.
"Yeah," she says. "Don't worry, we're going to help you."
"I could go if I wanted," I say. "I could get right by you."
"Are you crying?" she says. "Don't cry."
"I'm not crying," I say.
"Don't," she says, but she doesn't touch me and I'm past her, out the door.
I turn right and not left, not back to the mall but out the emergency exit so an alarm starts ringing. The scissors are still in my hand and the sun is bright. I slip away slow between all the cars in the parking lot, my footsteps silent and holding my breath. When I carefully look up across and over the cars no one is following. I am already thinking what to do next.
Eight
These days I have a mountain bicycle with nubbed rubber tires that can make it up and down the muddy gravel road. It's all downhill from where I live on Wildwing Road to the library so it only takes about half an hour. Under the tall trees, in and out of the ruts. I have neighbors up here who raise llamas and others who raise dogs that are half wolf. This means there must be at least one wolf with them who teaches all the dogs to howl like that. When they start in at night I think of Lala and wonder if I really saw her back in the snow and how far a dog can run and how old a dog can get. Late at night I also think of Nameless and the decisions he made and wonder if he's still trying and he's gotten further or has given up or has been caught or maybe has become a different kind of animal who can't communicate at all. I wonder where he came from that made him become like that and whether he remembers it, if he had parents or a family, whether he is trying to forget it or whether he has truly forgotten it.
