Life Among the Terranauts Page 12

  Murder Games

  Ella’s backpack sagged with flashlight and string, fruit snacks and masking tape and two forks and a bike helmet. The best part of adventures was always the planning. “Goggles,” FootFoot the Kangaroo suggested. “A compass,” said Duncan Hines, a bear the chocolate color of the frosting. Ella considered the one in her mother’s phone; she played with it while they waited for allergy shots. The allergies were why Ella didn’t have pets, the flesh-blood-drool-noise kind. Her animals were real in different ways.

  At the allergist Ella looked for north, true north, and then her mother pointed seven thousand miles southeast. This was where Ella’s father was. It was hot and dry and her father wore only clothes the color of the dryness. He slept in a long building where the sand sneaked in, and he blew this sound into the telephone for Ella, the fizz of dirt against metal. It was a different hour in this country, sometimes a whole different day, and Ella often asked her mother what her father was doing at particular times. “Sleeping,” she’d say, or “Eating,” or “Working.” Ella’s father was a mechanic, and these past months it had been easy enough for Ella to picture him underneath trucks instead of cars, brown beasts instead of their red minivan. “He’s thinking of you,” her mother would say, even when she’d already said, “Sleeping.” “He’s safe,” she added, although it had not occurred to Ella to worry, and then Ella did.

  “No compass,” Ella said to Duncan Hines, because her mother needed to be avoided. Her anger was palpable, rising off her like cartoon stink lines, filling the rooms downstairs. All Ella had done was ask her where Blanket was, and boom. A thousand-pointed star of Angry. Blanket was missing, but Ella would have to find him herself. This was the mission.

  Missy the Kitten begged to be on the expeditionary force, but Ella didn’t like girl toys. She didn’t like the pink thread dividing Missy’s paws into toes or the curled lashes painted on her plastic eyes. Missy gave warnings like “Be careful!” and “Not so high!” and “Don’t get caught!” This was what being a girl meant to Ella, because this was what Ella herself was like. She was afraid and tired of being afraid.

  Once she overheard her mother say, “Well, they’re very resilient at this age. It’s hard to know how much they’re really picking up on.”

  Everything, Ella thought. I am paying attention to everything.

  She listened and collected the items she didn’t understand, held them like the lobed pieces of a puzzle that might yet be completed. So far there was no image, only holes, but she was trying. Blanket’s disappearance, her mother’s mood—perhaps this afternoon some key piece was at hand, a corner or edge.

  All her best animals were big-souled, fearless, and adventuresome. They were all boys: FootFoot and Duncan Hines and Dinomite the Dinosaur and Bonk the Bear, whose butt was a rubber ball that was supposed to bounce. But he was named after the sound he made when Ella threw him, the way he thudded against the floor and slumped over. He wanted to be on the expeditionary force anyway. Boys were brave. Brave but stupid. They smashed themselves against objects that had no give. Last week Ella’s brother, Josh, leaped off their backyard swing set and an exposed screw ripped across his upper arm. The skin split and even before the blood, something yellow bulged out. Fat, she supposed, it must be fat, but who knew their swing set could unleash it, could expose the body’s secrets?

  Blanket was splitting too, ragged around his edges. Every night in bed she walked this territory with her lips, ran the unraveling hem across her mouth until she knew each thread. She held him the way her mother held rosary beads, the way she knew God with her fingers. Blanket could read the inside of Ella’s head without words, without judgment. He would never be angry with her. He was like God in this way, but better. As his hem unraveled, the old river of him ran out, the white fabric stiff against her lips. She thought of how small she had been, back when Blanket was this white, and how perfectly he knew her even then.

  Her mother had been insisting that Blanket needed to be re-hemmed, his edges turned under before he unraveled completely. This was murder to Ella, mutilation. She would sooner sew her own edges shut, her fingers to her palms, arms to her sides, toes agonizingly to her ankles.

  “We have to re-hem it before it falls to bits,” her mother said.

  “You can’t. You just can’t.”

  Her mother sighed. “Why are you being like this?” she said, and Ella could hear that she meant more than the current situation with Blanket. As if Ella had a choice to be other than the way she was.

  “It’ll hurt him.”

  “Even if it does, honey, the hemming has to happen,” her mother said, exasperated but steely.

  When the topic of the blanket comes up, years afterward, her mother means it to be funny. Ella is a sophomore in high school. Josh spent a year in college, dropped out, and joined the army. He’s stationed down in Texas. He says it’s hot. He says he’s happy.

  Ella’s first boyfriend’s mother has driven the couple home from the movies and waits while the boy walks Ella to the door. Ella’s mother invites them inside. The boy gestures at the idling minivan—he shouldn’t keep his mother waiting. The minivan is nice, but not too nice. The boy’s family has more money than Ella’s, but not so much more. The women wave at each other, a little salute. This is a milestone for everybody, the children old enough to be shepherded home in the dark, monitored with concentration: Is that lip gloss rubbed off on the boy’s mouth? Are those blue marks on the girl’s neck? A satisfaction along with the worry: We have all made it this far, all of us grown up tonight, or nearly. No one has been lost along the way.

  “How was the movie?” Ella’s mother asks, and both teenagers shrug. They bought tickets for a PG film so they could sneak into an R-rated one, and neither can think quickly enough to form an opinion of a movie other than the one they weren’t supposed to see, flying body parts, a sinister serial killer. A teen died in a swimming-pool drain. Another in a blender, bit by bit. Ella will have nightmares tonight, but she won’t admit it. Not to her mother, not to Liam. Things have always been too real to her. They take on life when she isn’t looking, the world filled with inadvertent spirits. Her mother has told her this is melodramatic, the way molehills become haunted mountains in her mind. She’s tried, but she can’t blunt her own imagination the way this boy apparently can, the way he laughed out loud during the scene with the industrial dough kneader.

  Something sailed into her bedroom and hit Ella in the back of the head. A Nerf ball, she was relieved to realize, without needing to look. She turned. Josh still had a bandage around his upper arm. When their father was on a video call, Josh wore long sleeves. Their father told him to take care of the house, take care of his sister, and sometimes for an hour Josh and Ella tried to play catch in the backyard. “You’re afraid of the ball,” he complained, and Ella thought, Duh. Josh had lost half his baby teeth to balls. The Tooth Fairy left him a note saying, Be more careful or no more quarters. Their father was at home then, and the Tooth Fairy’s handwriting looked suspiciously like his. Everybody wanted Ella to be tough until they wanted her to be something else. They wanted her to stand in front of the ball until it hit her in the face and then they wondered why she didn’t move away. They wanted her to be strong and not miss her daddy too much, and then when she didn’t come to the phone because she was in the tree outside with Blanket and it had been a lot of work to climb that high, her mother yelled at her.

  “What,” Ella had said then. “What did I do?”

  “If I went away, would you stop caring about me?” her mother had asked.

  Of course not, Ella thought, but everyone was telling her all the time that her father was safe, so why did it matter if she spoke to him now or tomorrow or next week?

  “You’re a little monster sometimes,” her mother had told her.

  “Look out,” FootFoot whispered now, and Ella felt the animals crowd closer to her. Josh picked Banana out of the heap and threw him into the air and this was supposed to annoy her
but the joke was on Josh because Banana was already a bird, and Ella didn’t even like him. Banana was from the Goodwill. When her mother gave him to Ella, camouflaged as new in a toy-store box, for her birthday, she could tell he was already dead. He had empty black eyes and the weird scent of the secondhand store, the damp, gray smell like…dirty? Poor? Poorness? Poor people? To Ella, poor people were the ones on television with no food but round stomachs, something she didn’t understand but refused to ask about. She did not know what poor people in America might look like. She did not know why their things smelled so weird. And she did not know why they had owned Banana before she did and why this smell had come to infect her house.

  Josh bounced Banana off the ceiling a few times. The fan was off, and the bird flew neatly between the still blades. Ella kicked the backpack with the expeditionary force’s supplies under her bed. She took a pink Barbie hairbrush from her nightstand to groom Bonk’s fur.

  “I’m having people over tonight,” Josh said. “So you have to stay out of the way.”

  The black paint on Bonk’s eyes was scratched. His gaze drifted leftward.

  “Mom said we’re ordering pizza but once we eat, you should play up here.”

  “Okay,” Ella said. She didn’t even want to play with her brother’s friends. All their games were boy games, all with murder in the name: Murder Ball and Murder Jump and Murder Swing, and when it was dark and their mom was in bed, there was Murder, plain Murder, the boys wandering through the house tagged out one by one by the Murderer. Once, they invited Ella to play and left her alive on purpose, stumbling in the dark by herself while the boys played video games in the basement. She cried when she found them and she couldn’t tell, as Josh took her hand to lead her back to her bedroom, whether he was sorry or just embarrassed.

  “Don’t get in the way.”

  “Okay.”

  If Blanket were here there would be preparations. He would be folded, hidden under her pillow. She knew how he looked to anyone besides her, how limp, how gray, how ragged. She didn’t want Josh’s friends to laugh at him, at her. But Blanket could be anywhere, could be found and tossed up into the ceiling fan tonight. The mission was more urgent than she’d realized.

  “Do you have Blanket?” she asked her brother.

  “I told you. No. I don’t know where it is.” Josh stopped tossing Banana. “You know Mom needed to hem it. You know it was falling apart.”

  “He’s fine.”

  Josh shrugged, looked at her with a dangerous pity. He changed the subject: “You can borrow my reading book tonight, if you want.”

  Now Ella shrugged. This was a privilege, but she didn’t want Josh to know. Her own reading textbook was dull, with stories about things like crossing the road and eating vegetables. Josh’s book had adventures. The best story was about a thief caught in the act. The owner of the house promised not to call the police, and the thief laughed. “You think I’m naive?” he asked, and there was an asterisk after naive and a definition at the bottom of the page: “childlike.” This offended Ella. What was childlike about the thief—the hushed confrontation, his doomed leap from a window, or the way he appeared on the next page with a bandage around his head? She sensed that the word really meant something else but she couldn’t tell what. “Foolish”? “Stupid”? But why would there be a book for kids that insulted kids?

  Josh brought the book from his room and she turned to her favorite page. Someone had drawn two black fangs in the thief’s mouth, erased the eyes to two white spots. “It wasn’t me,” Josh said automatically.

  Maybe naive meant “trusting,” in which case how adult a definition, how trusting they were to think kids so trusting. Ella tried to imagine the way her mother imagined her, a bright rubber ball whizzing through the world. Naive, she thought toward her mother. You are so naive.

  Nine years later, when Ella stands on the porch with her boyfriend, she knows he would rather die than kiss her in front of her mother. They would both rather die. In a blender. But he wants to be manly. He takes her hand and then lets go, brief as a kiss. It feels ridiculous. Ella looks down at her surrendered hand, dangling fingers, green nail polish. She does not love this boy, not even close. They started sitting next to each other in mythology class, their language arts elective, so he could copy her answers about the Moirai and Parcae. He is hard to joke with because he takes everything literally. He’s pretty naive, Ella thinks, but she doesn’t mind. They both know—even if they don’t acknowledge it to each other, or themselves—that they are only marking time. They are learning things they will need later on for other moments, other people, other kisses.

  Ella’s mother thanks the boy for getting Ella home safely. Ella goes inside and watches out the window while Liam switches places with his mother so he can practice driving. Ella is one month younger, still waiting on her learner’s permit. She holds her breath while the boy backs out slowly, but he doesn’t hit anything. Then he is gone, out of sight up the road. In the kitchen Ella takes a soda from the fridge.

  Her mother follows her, a conspiratorial smile lurking, as if there are details Ella will now divulge, girl talk they are about to have. Her mother even braces her hands behind her on the kitchen counter, pulls herself up, and thonks the cabinets with her heels. She begins joking about the embarrassing things she could have done, wanting credit for not doing them: showing Liam naked baby pictures of Ella, clumsy old drawings, Ella’s animals. “Duncan Hines!” her mother says. “Or Bonk. Remember when your Blankie—”

  “Yeah,” Ella says flatly, because she remembers, and this story is not funny to her. She can grow up and get old, but it will still not be funny. Her animals are stashed now in her bedroom closet, tied in plastic bags she once would have been terrified would suffocate them. They are not alive to her anymore, but they are not quite dead. An aura clings to them, even if it’s only the memory of what it felt like to be certain they breathed and spoke and loved her. To be certain there was a set of rules, a code that governed who lived and who stopped living.

  With Duncan Hines in her backpack, Ella surveyed the upstairs: her room—already torn apart from searching—the bathroom, the linen closet. There was Josh’s room and her parents’ room, but she wasn’t supposed to go into either, and she was still hoping to find Blanket on undisputed ground. Downstairs, in the living room, she imagined herself the thief in Josh’s reading book, poking through the couch cushions and behind the forest of photographs lined up on a bookshelf—individual portraits, family portraits, her father, over and over again. It was disconcerting, this forest of faces. When her father first deployed, her mother suggested that Ella stand at this shelf and talk to his pictures about her day at school. Ella had talked about how Bonk the Bear hid in her backpack without her permission, and Gus Stepansky saw him and made fun of her.

  “Your father says you shouldn’t take your toys to school,” her mother said. “He says to tell you you can’t be bullied if you don’t give them reasons to bully you.”

  Gradually Ella stopped telling stories in the living room. She still talked to her father, but at night, in her bed. She talked about how Gus Stepansky’s father was married to a stepmother, and Ella wondered if the stepmother thought of Gus the way that Ella thought of Banana: You smell funny. Someone else has already loved furrows in your hair. There have been other lips on your skin. Scratches across your eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t that way. Maybe it was too different. Gus would grow, he would change, he would get bigger, but animals only got grimier, looser, until eventually they fell apart. Ella understood this better than she did the death of the bird Josh found one day on the sidewalk, in a way more real than the death of Bambi’s mother or her own grandfather. More real than what she knew her mother feared, her father leaving and being gone so long he never came back. She understood things through her animals, and this was not a small or stupid way of understanding, just different.

  “I need to find Blanket,” Ella told her father’s picture. “Have you seen him?”r />
  Her father’s bright smile never changed. Ella imagined her mother choosing another man to bring into the house, a new father who might nuzzle her head and find her smelly.

  Out the side door and into the yard. Plastic table, plastic sandbox in the shape of a turtle, two plastic chairs blown over. An empty bird feeder. Ella had no idea why Blanket would be out here but she had to check everywhere. In her backpack the string was unused, the flashlight unlit. She took the fork out and shook it at the swing set still marked with Josh’s blood. “En garde,” she said.

  Her mother rapped on the kitchen window. She held up the phone and gestured Ella inside. “Your dad,” she said as Josh finished his turn and handed the phone over.

  “How was school?” her father asked.

  “Fine,” Ella said. They’d done math worksheets where correct answers gave the colors for a picture, and her bee ended up purple. But with her father gone, she could leave things out. He’d never see the purple bee. Josh could wear a long-sleeved shirt. Later, when she was a teenager, she would think that maybe this year had been the beginning of a new way of being a daughter, the beginning of—not deception, exactly, but editing, perhaps. The silences that exist inside all stories.

  He asked her what she was going to do tomorrow, which was an impossible question to answer. She wondered if he had any idea what her life was like. She went where people told her, took the brown paper bags they pressed into her hands, and at the appointed hour, she ate what she found there. In the afternoon her mother’s car pulled up, and they usually went home, but sometimes they went to the grocery store or the dentist or the Goodwill. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll go to the dentist,” she told her father.