Safekeeping Read online

  “He…”

  But she is unable to put into words what he did to her that night. She doesn’t have to.

  “That’s the night I left Windsor. I went back to my place only long enough to shower, put on fresh clothes, and get Jerry Lee. You found me in the woods a few days later.”

  Now I understood why she never left the schoolhouse. Why she locked herself inside when I was away. Even with Jerry Lee by her side to protect her.

  “Are you pregnant?” I whisper.

  “No. No. I can’t be.” And another sigh. “If I ever see him again I’ll kill him.”

  I take her hand in the dark to warm her, to comfort her. “Don’t worry,” I whisper. “I’ll be right beside you. You won’t have to do it alone.”

  I wake feeling crushed by what Celia has told me. But she acts the same as always. So I follow her lead.

  Out foraging, I discover a mulberry tree. Picking and eating, filling the dented pail, I am grateful to have the sun on me, to have birds winging in and out of shafts of light, and insects leaping through the tall grass. The beauty of the day helps dispel the ugliness revealed the night before.

  My mother would pick mulberries from the tree behind our house every summer. She would bake the berries into pies.

  I can’t bake a pie. Even if we had an oven here I couldn’t bake a pie. I never followed my mother into the kitchen. There was always something else I’d rather do.

  When this is over, I will enter my mother’s kitchen with my sleeves rolled up and I won’t go away until she’s taught me everything I should know about baking a pie.

  And everything I should know about everything else, too.

  How she’ll laugh when I tell her that one day, in the midst of this ordeal, all I wanted in this sunlit moment was to be in her gleaming kitchen, wearing an apron, standing beside her, the two of us up to our wrists in flour.

  At night I dream of being hunted.

  Celia has nightmares, too. She thrashes in the bed and once or twice she’s punched me hard enough to raise a bruise.

  After three nights in a row of being woken by Celia crying out in her sleep, I say, “Enough. You have to get out of here. You’re losing your mind.”

  And later that morning I lead Celia and Jerry Lee to the pond with the curious ducks. It’s not much of a pond, mostly weeds and bracken, but the sky is cupped in its watery palm, and the sun warms us all the way to the bone.

  “Breathe it in,” I tell Celia.

  Her skin is so pale, her mouth so grim. She’s clearly uneasy being this far from the schoolhouse. But she nods and draws the fresh air into her lungs.

  Side by side, we study our reflections in the water. In our dun clothes, with our wild, spiky hair we resemble two enormous nestlings blown from a tree.

  Our Lady of the Barn has left two live chickens.

  Chickens!

  Along with a basket to carry them.

  And a plastic tub with food for them to eat.

  We move the bed into the front room and turn the far room into a chicken yard. Jerry Lee shows a doglike interest in chasing the chickens and they run and hide from him between my legs.

  When Celia speaks sharply to him, Jerry Lee tucks in his tail and slinks guiltily back to her side.

  “You’re crazy, you know,” Celia says, watching me clean out the back room. “It can’t be healthy to live in the same house with chickens. Why don’t you make a yard for them outside?”

  Though I feel safe now walking along the road, encountering people from time to time, I still think it’s better our home remains secret.

  “If we make a yard for them outside someone might see. They’ve got to live inside. I’ll clean up after them. What should we name them?”

  Celia rolls her eyes and leaves me to my housekeeping.

  I remember the barnyard photographs my mother took a couple of years ago. She won an award for them.

  As I pull up splintery floorboards in the back room to reveal the dirt beneath, I talk to the chickens. “My mother would be so happy to see you guys,” I murmur. “Maybe even happier to see you than to see me.”

  “That’s not true,” Celia calls, challenging me.

  “What’s not true?” I call back.

  “About your mother.”

  I have to rewind to what I’ve just said. Ah, about my mother preferring the chickens to me.

  “How do you know what’s true about my mother?” I ask Celia. “You’ve never met her. Believe me, she never saw a chicken she didn’t love. I, on the other hand, have not always been the model daughter.”

  The floorboards are beyond filthy, the dirt beneath the wooden boards totally disgusting. The chickens are constantly under foot and the work of preparing a “yard” for them in the sweltering schoolhouse has me feeling more than a little testy. All these rusty nails and beer cans; I’m grateful I got that tetanus booster before leaving for Haiti.

  Celia says, “I’m willing to bet your mother loves you more than any chickens.”

  Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. But I think about my mother pacing in the front hall when I arrived home hours later than expected. I remember the generous amount on my dinner plate and the tiny portion on Mom’s when money was tight. I remember finding her weeping silently on the sofa after we’d fought. I remember the forgiving touch of my mother when she kissed me good night, her gentle movements through the house when she nursed me through illness. I remember that whenever I asked for her attention, she stopped what she was doing and gave it to me.

  Celia interrupts my thoughts. “It’s the way you do things, Rad. The way you took care of me when we first met. The way you’ve taken care of me ever since. You knew how to do those things because your mother does them for you. That’s how I know how much she loves you.”

  I sit watching the chickens pecking happily away in their new luxury indoor chicken yard.

  I don’t want to admit it but Celia’s right.

  “I’m thinking,” I tell her, pretending to ignore what she’s just said, “I’m thinking the chickens’ names should be Wynonna and Ashley. Ashley’s the red one.”

  I haven’t managed to get Celia out since the day we went to the pond, but while I’m away gathering food, she starts exploring the weeds and undergrowth around the perimeter of the schoolhouse, collecting acorns, pinecones, feathery grasses, abandoned nests. She arranges the treasures throughout our room, sometimes posing Jethro’s bear in the midst of it all. It’s comical to watch her chase the chickens away when they flap over to investigate. Celia’s creativity astounds me. Her antics with Jerry Lee and the chickens make me laugh.

  I’m so grateful that this schoolhouse has turned out to be less a prison, more a home. And it’s Celia who’s made it so.

  I wish I could show my parents how we’ve managed. I hope I can remember everything when I see them again.

  The day slips away and the western sky colors, and our stomachs are full enough inside our little room thanks to Our Lady of the Barn. Celia begins to hum, I to dance. I know mostly my parents’ music. Celia knows the hard-edged, brittle, newer music. The music I should know. The music I would know if my parents weren’t such funny old hippies.

  We have a vast library of songs between us, particularly when I add in the music of the orphans.

  Dancing and singing make the time pass.

  The chickens like it, too.

  They’ve started laying eggs! Eggs! The chickens are laying eggs!

  There are two of them waiting for us this morning. Warm, beautiful, perfect eggs.

  “We’re eating raw eggs?” Celia asks.

  I’ve been fantasizing about eggs for weeks. “We’ve got to cook them,” I say.

  “Radley, how do you plan to do that?”

  Back in sixth-grade science class we made solar cookers with boxes and black paint. I might find a couple of boxes when I’m out exploring, but where am I going to find black paint?

  “We’ll need a fire,” I admit, thinking of the matc
hes I brought from home.

  “But a fire would draw attention to us,” Celia says.

  I nod. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking. We dig a little hole, we line it with rocks. Put some dried grass in it, then some twigs.”

  Celia is listening but her face has that this-is-never-going-to-work look.

  “It will work, Celia. We’ve got a couple of tin cans. We let some water sit in them, warming up in the sun while we get a little fire going, a little one, and we put the eggs in the warm water in the cans, put the cans in the fire on top of the stones, and feed just enough twigs and grass into the flames to get the water to boil. We can do this.”

  Celia’s smile is lopsided with doubt.

  But I’m certain we can do it.

  And we do.

  With hardly any smoke.

  I go off for some distance and check to see how visible our little cooking experiment is.

  In the end, although the eggs aren’t exactly hard-boiled, they’re not raw either.

  Now I love Wynonna and Ashley not only because they entertain us, but because they feed us, too. Can there be anything more wonderful than a chicken? Finally I get why my mother is so crazy about them.

  My egg, when I finally bite into it, tastes more delicious than any meal I can ever remember.

  And now we know that we can cook. At least a little. And we can make hot water, and hot rocks. “Next goal … coffee,” I say, egg yolk clinging to my teeth.

  “Proud of yourself, aren’t you, Rad,” Celia says as she catches some egg bits with her finger and tucks them back into her mouth.

  I nod, noticing with joy that Celia is having no trouble keeping this meal down.

  “You should be proud of yourself,” Celia says. “Now, if you could just make salt?”

  On Celia’s birthday, what we think is Celia’s birthday, I steal a small melon. I pick a handful of wildflowers.

  I remember the restaurants where we, as a family, went on birthdays over the years. I remember the cake my mother baked in the shape of a teddy bear when I was six; I remember the trays of cupcakes with glitter and thick chocolate icing I’d take to school to share with my classmates.

  I remember the gifts: the books, the games, the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel had been bought by my parents from a man grieving the death of his wife. They were so pleased to give it to me. I had learned to spin at school and “showed a talent for it,” my teacher said.

  But I could never bring myself to sit at that wheel. It had the man’s grief in it. It had the wife’s ghost sitting there where they expected me to sit. How could I spin wool on it? Who could wear anything knit from wool spun on that wheel?

  My parents kept it anyway, even though I never touched it. One day, while I was at school, they moved it out of my room, down to the basement. Never said a word about it. Just one day it was blessedly out of my sight.

  I vow that I will spin on that wheel when I get home. I’ll make yarn for my mother to knit. And I will love everything she makes for me. Everything.

  Celia is remembering past birthdays too, I think.

  Neither of us says much.

  But we gnaw on the melon right down to the rind. What remains goes to Ashley and Wynonna, who are elated.

  Our Lady of the Barn leaves a small loaf of bread for us.

  To taste fresh homemade bread, no butter, no jam, simply the wheat of it, the yeast of it, the salt of it, fills me with happiness. To see Celia enjoy food again and keep it down is such a relief.

  I have no reason to feel so but I am utterly content. It’s strange. I let the feeling work its way through me, I fix the sensation of it under my skin so that I can call it up again when I need it.

  For this moment I don’t think about the political and social mayhem south of here, about the gangs, the murders, the sickness spreading to every corner of the U.S. I don’t think about my parents and what has befallen them. In an hour I’ll think of those things, or tomorrow.

  But right now, I am content.

  The light this morning strokes the splintery wooden floor of our schoolhouse. Out the door, the dissolving mist transforms our little clearing into a fairyland of sparkling dew.

  I ignore the demands of the chickens, button into my ink-stained shirt, my pants, my boots, and walk into the gleaming morning.

  For the first time, Jerry Lee leaves Celia and comes with me.

  One of the articles in a recent newspaper left by Our Lady of the Barn says that every eligible American between the ages of eighteen and thirty who is not already a member of the military, must, starting immediately, give two years of public service. The “volunteers” are not even consulted about type of work or location. They are being sent anywhere in the country the government needs them. And from the sound of it, the government needs them everywhere.

  The president calls this “an opportunity to be on the ground floor of restoring the country’s balance.” Congress is calling it “a redistribution of talent.” They’re touting “the glory of serving one’s country in its time of great need.”

  But if you ask me, I’d say they’ve got a lot of nerve. They broke the country. They should be out there fixing it themselves.

  The night is hot. We sleep in our T-shirts on top of the blanket.

  Nocturnal animals rustle outside the flimsy walls. I hear them in the dried leaves.

  The chickens murmur softly in their sleep.

  I am wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. Celia, it seems, is also sleepless.

  We talk more at night, side by side in the dark, than we do during the hours of daylight. The topics of our night talks are often forbidden subjects during the day. Something about the intimacy of the dark makes us more open with each other.

  “Do you think, Radley, that we come back after we die?” Celia asks quietly.

  “You mean like ghosts?”

  “No,” Celia says. “Like in a new body.”

  “Reincarnation?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Celia says. “That.”

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Maybe.”

  “Who would you want to be the next time you come back?” Celia asks.

  “What will the world be like then? Like it was before the APPs? Like the world we’re in now? Or like the world at the end of all this?”

  Celia is quiet for a moment. “Like the world will be after this is over and forgotten.”

  “This will never be forgotten, Ceil. Unless you’re thinking millions of years from now … when humans are extinct.”

  Celia sighs, exasperated.

  “Who do you want to be the next time?” I ask her.

  “I want to be the daughter of a famous photographer,” she says softly.

  For the first time since we’ve been together I intentionally turn my back on Celia.

  Pressing my palms hard against my eyes, I wait for the wave of longing to subside.

  I crave a hot shower, a flush toilet, light switches, a washing machine. I want a chair and a sofa and a mattress. I yearn for clothes that fit, shampoo that lathers … I ache for scented things, girly things. I want a pantry full of food and a stove to cook it on.

  I will not take anything for granted should this ever end, should I find my way back to civilization. I will be such a good daughter. My parents won’t even know me.

  I always stop at Our Lady of the Barn first to see if there’s anything waiting for me. Then I head into Sutton. It’s hours of walking each day, but though I am always hungry, I am also more fit than I’ve ever been in my life.

  In Sutton, the owner of the restaurant who caught me so soon after we arrived often stops me now with wrapped-up parcels of food to take back to the schoolhouse.

  Carrying her generous care packages, I remember, in Haiti, tearing open bricks of instant noodles sent by my parents. I would hold a child on my hip while the water boiled. Another would lean against my leg. The cook, Eulalie, always managed to turn the brittle twigs into such tasty meals.

  And later, before b
ed, with our stomachs well pleased, the children would sing with me, or they would clamor for stories, just as Celia does, stories of snow, stories of my big house, and my clever cat.

  How I miss the purring of Romulus in my lap. There were cats in Haiti but they were wild. The children purred in my lap instead. And here? Here the chickens do the same.

  And it is almost as good.

  I’m unpacking the pail filled with the most recent offerings from Our Lady of the Barn. Normally Celia pulls the objects out, one at a time, spreading them across our rough table. But today she sits on the bed and watches.

  “You okay, Celia?”

  She nods.

  Three tomatoes emerge from the pail and catch the sunlight. Celia usually eats fresh tomatoes straightaway, the juice rolling down her arm.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I ask.

  She nods.

  I walk two steps to the bed, place a tomato in Celia’s hands, then kiss her cheeks, one at a time.

  Her lashes are wet against my face.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I’m just feeling really alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” I tell her.

  “When this is over you’ll leave. You’ll fly back to your parents. I’ll be more alone than I’ve ever been in my life. It’ll be just me and Jerry Lee again.”

  “So come home with me.”

  “I’d never fit in your world.”

  We’re silent, thinking about that, about how different we are. Would it really be any harder in Brattleboro than it is here?

  I wonder.

  “Look,” Celia says. “If it doesn’t work out for you when you get home, Radley, will you promise to find me?”

  I can’t even find my parents and once I do I’m never letting them out of my sight. But I don’t want to upset Celia.

  And so I nod. “Of course I’ll come find you. If things don’t work out. I promise. Even if they do work out, we’ll stay in touch, Celia. I can visit you. You’ll come and stay with me. Honestly, your biggest problem will be how to get rid of me.”