I learned adding and subtracting before counting. Later, when she tried to teach me the rightful names of numbers, it took two months to set them straight in my head. One bead on my needle was a little girl, eyes closed, sitting in sunlight. Two were streamside under a low-branched blossoming, tearing petals and tossing into water gossamer canoes. Three beads were watching the baby, taking turns. Four were each on a blanket corner playing tea and crawling towards petit fours. Five, the baby in the middle, the color of cakes. I added girls and stories up to ten, then took away. Ten, the day cresting into fading, torn dress turns towards home. Nine catches a glint of her father’s boat coming in. Eight drifts farther into dusk, grass where she sat bent and singed.
Eight
When I wake up the light is bright and loose, and the porch steps come slowly into focus. I startle and tip forward as a hand grabs my shoulder to steady me. Then I realize: Everett, his breath in my hair, letting me sleep, standing here straddling the stopped bike. I don’t want to move and for a second can’t find my voice. “How long was I asleep?” I finally ask.
“A while.” His voice is so tender I hold my breath. “I rode all around town, but then my legs got tired and I rode back here. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
“Good.”
As I glance back at the house, I can almost swear the curtain of the front window swishes. I pitch forward and scramble up the stairs, suddenly sure that Grand has been watching us all this time.
“Ansel.” His voice is low and quiet and makes me shiver. He cranes back for my books and holds them out to me, and when I reach for them he stretches out his pointer finger to touch my knuckles before letting go.
“I’ll see you later,” I say, looking back one more time to see him straddling the bicycle, his long, lanky body loose, relaxed, his gaze steady and intent.
When I bang through the screen door Grand is standing at the stove behind something sizzling. “There you are,” she says, not taking her eyes from her skillet. She holds the spatula by the very tip of the handle, prodding at some eggs like she’s checking that they’re dead. The fact that she’s not staring me down means I imagined the curtain—she didn’t see anything.
“Sorry—I’ll do that.” I drop the books on the counter and gingerly take the spatula from Grand’s fingers. The eggs are a hard snot-yellow at the edges but still milky and curdled-looking in the middle. I flip the whole yellow mass over, chop it with the spatula and stir it around.
“You were up early,” Grand says, sliding into a chair. “Where have you been all morning?”
“It’s not lunchtime yet,” I hedge, unsure whether she missed me at all last night and only noticed this morning I wasn’t home. I can’t hear anything from upstairs. I strain for even the tiniest squeak of bedsprings, a sigh, a cough, listening so hard I can practically hear dust settling on the jewel-colored glass animals lining the kitchen windowsill. “I didn’t make you miss your date with Bob Barker, did I?”
Grand presses her lips into a tight smile and brusquely swishes the hem of her floral housecoat. I try to imagine what she looked like when she was my age, and Izzy’s. The earliest picture I’ve ever seen of her was the one from her wedding when she wore a tight little sheath dress and a pillbox hat with a veil. She was unsmiling, her dark eyes flat as always, and she only came up to Granddad’s bow-tied collar. He was beaming, his hands on both her shoulders, holding her out to the camera like Grand was a coat the photographer was about to put on.
I was five when my father showed me that picture and the rest of the ones in the musty white leather album. He let me sit on the floor with the album in my lap and turn the pages, and when we were done I looked up at him. He was lingering over the last page, intent on this final picture. I wanted to feel his eyes on me, so I snapped the album shut, and when I did he kept staring for a minute at the air where the last picture had been. Then he took the album from my small hands and slotted it between encyclopedias on the bookshelf in his mother’s room. When I wrapped my arms around his leg to get him to lift me, we just stood there behind the light-filled curtains, his hand on my hair.
Once Grand is parked in front of the TV I make Izzy’s lunch and carry the tray upstairs. She’s lying on her side with her back to the door, the white coverlet messily tugged up over one shoulder, and the sharp tang of her leaky urine bag and old diaper makes my lungs catch. Her back is very still, her hair fluffy and matted at the back of her neck like lemon cotton candy. I put the tray down on the little desk and my throat flutters, the leaden weight in my stomach twists as I slowly approach the bed.
Izzy jerks and lets out a squeal that dissolves into giggles, turning her shoulders to hold out a cat’s cradle of blue yarn latticed between her fingers.
“Izzy, good God, if I have a heart attack, you know you’re up a creek,” I say, relief rushing into my lungs. She’s giggling like a crazy person—she can’t stop. I stick my hand through her cat’s cradle and with a quick twang she drops fingers and stretches her hands wide, the string still looped across the sides of her hands, her face lit and dazzling. She threads the cat’s cradle again, and when I creep my hand up through the taut trap, she holds me for a minute, letting the string pinch my wrist. Her eyes are the color of tarnish, and she stops laughing, holds my gaze for a second, the bite of the string deepening. Then I’m free, and Izzy is holding a loop of blue yarn between her pinkies, looking me square in the eye and laughing again, a sound that smoothes down all the jagged bits in my insides.
Both of us know I said the one thing I shouldn’t, wielding a pretend envy against real guilt she feels. I don’t begrudge her the body she spends so much time running from, trying to spread herself thin against a heaving horizon. How most days I’m content to follow my mind’s gush and retreat, the internal turnings and tides. I never know where they’ll wash up. But knowing how the guilt lines her insides, more silent than a voice I can’t hear, I shouldn’t have said it. How she was calm, absorbing the words, the must-be sharp slice of them against her all-feeling skin, then how suddenly she drew up into one hard edge. How she tried to hold, turned, fled down the stairs and out, the hurt of my words catching up in one rush and washing back like silt in my veins before I could take them back. How one untruth finds a trueness in the one whose bruises brought it on. What I should have—please, I need them—said.
Nine
Izzy’s temperature is back up to 101˚ but she’s clear-eyed, intent on her books, and she doesn’t take her eyes from the pages as she opens her mouth for me to drop in the aspirin and tilt a glass to her lips. The house is dark with late-afternoon shadow when I go downstairs for the sewing scissors Grand keeps in the cabinets behind the kitchen table. I shove past all the old bills and lists and table linens so ancient they’re stiff along their creases to pull out the sewing kit. Putting everything back, I notice a stack of ragged-lipped envelopes rubber-banded together, all addressed to Grand with a return address from Carson & Carson Contractors. One of the envelopes has the postmark date June 3, 1974—only a month old, and the memory of Mrs. Jorgen and Mrs. Sibley saying something about the Carson brothers and money nudges me.
I slide the top envelope out from under the rubber band and peek inside. There’s half a piece of watermarked green paper with a ragged perforation across the bottom. At the top it reads “Group term policy for John Mackenzie” and under that “Death benefits paid in the form of annuity” with the date 5/1/74—5/30/74. Next to that is the number 543.56. I pull out another envelope and this one reads 4/1/74—4/31/74 and next to it again, 543.56. They’re both signed neatly at the bottom, Carl Carson. I read the words over and over but whatever I’m supposed to catch hovers just above me.
The couch creaks in the other room and I shove all the envelopes back, stacking them in front of some manila folders puffy with crinkled pages and labeled “Medical—John,” “Medical—Ansel” and “Medical—Isabel.” I shift