“With all his clothes on too,” Dad chimes in. “He didn’t cut his wrists. He didn’t drink himself to death. He drowned himself. How the hell do you drown yourself?” He shakes his head sadly. “Whatever drove him to it must have been a god-awful thing.”
“I only met Albert once,” Mom says. “Everyone said he was a funny duck.” Mom called me a funny duck once. “He kept to himself a lot.” Mom says I should make more friends. “Always so serious. Carrying the weight of the world on his back.” Mom says I’m too serious.
“Poor Albert,” she continues, looking in the visor mirror. Lauren turns a page in her coloring book. “I wonder what it was. Maybe,” she winks at me, “maybe he had an extra toe so the army wouldn’t take him. Or maybe . . . an arm growing out of his stomach!” She turns quickly in her seat. “Boo!”
Lauren’s still coloring. Mrs. Wiggins woofs.
I stare. It’s not funny.
“Lily . . .” Mom moans, “I’m teasing.”
“Dummy,” Lauren mumbles. “She’s teeeez-ing.”
I slug her arm, then turn my back to her and open Aunt Jamie’s book and concentrate on seeing a human being in the lumps of blind dough and bug-eyed guppies in each picture. I smile at the pretty pregnant girl in the photographs and wonder if the fetus is healthy. Is it a boy or a girl or a hermaphrodite? Will it have Down syndrome like Aunt Cass? There’s weird stuff in our family and Judy says weird stuff gets passed down. Maybe Cousin Albert had a tail.
When I turn to the eighth week, I gasp.
It’s me, inside out: the single-celled-something-weird that becomes a mud frog, a newt in Mother’s rock garden, a fish, a monkey, or Adam and Eve. At eight weeks and one inch, my heart has been beating for a month. Draped in an egg-white shower curtain, I’m a shrimp, a tiny hunchback with webbed fingers, plastic doll joints and black bullet eyes. My head is stitched together like a baseball. The picture is me on the inside: a fuzzy cashew floating in a starry galaxy.
What happens next month to Lily Elaine Asher of Portland, Oregon, West Coast, United States of America, Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, in Forever and Ever, amen? Stay tuned, readers!
“Do fetuses have feelings?” I suddenly blurt out. “Do they know right from wrong? I mean, in a fetus kind of way?”
“Did you bring that damn book?” Mom asks impatiently. She lights another cigarette.
“I brought Jules Verne too.”
Dad touches Mom’s shoulder. “You’re the best read kid I know, Lily Lou,” he says. “No. Fetuses are too busy growing and changing to know right from wrong. Their brains are just developing.”
The radio crackles. It’s mostly fuzz except for some guy answering phone calls far away. “I’ll be damned,” Dad says, twisting the dials. “It’s Joe Pine, all the way up here!”
All the way up here and out the car window, Lauren holds up her Brownie Starlight camera and takes blurry snapshots of tall dark trees pressing against each other, crowding out even Bambi. I get dizzy trying to hold my eyes in one place and focus, looking for a path through the dense undergrowth to a hideaway in the bushes.
And wait.
If no one sees me, and I wait as quietly as I can, for as long as I can, something will happen there. Something special. I know it.
* * *
Lauren’s asleep with her hand on the camera when Dad drives around a slow-moving red jeep pulling a matching red rowboat. Jesus waves a bottle of Coke at me from the backseat. He smiles and picks up His tackle box, waving that at me too.
Jesus?
If He’s “always on the job,” like Gramma Frieda says, shouldn’t He be feeding all those starving kids in China?
Okay, so He’s taking the day off, going fishing. Big deal.
“Where’s the funeral?” Dad laughs as he turns into the lane in front of them. Does he see them too?
Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head sit up front, their eyes (and upside-down noses) on the road. I haven’t seen the Potato Heads for a while—Lauren lost most of their eyes, noses, and mouths last year, which is fine with Mom because real potatoes are messy and smell bad after two weeks in my closet. I was experimenting: If potatoes grow underground, they’re used to the dark. How much would they grow in my dark closet? Is water more important or dirt? I was taking notes, even talking to Mr. Alsup (my science teacher) about it.
I keep an ant farm in my closet too. The ants climb to the top, where the clear plastic sky meets the green plastic frame, trying to get closer to God, so He can hear their prayers. Judy says that’s why Asian people build temples high in the mountains. Judy’s family has a miniature Japanese garden, so she knows stuff like that.
Where my bedroom wall meets the ceiling is where my prayers run, like ticker tape, like a locomotive, around and around my room, rattling and smoking, barely making the corners sometimes.
If I were Jesus, I wouldn’t sit in the backseat of the Potato Heads’ jeep. I’d drive instead, and fast. It’s not like it would kill Him.
My parents don’t mention the jeep’s strange passengers. Mom flips down her visor, touches up her lipstick, and checks me out in the mirror. “Lily, are you still looking at Jamie’s book?”
I want to answer, but at eight weeks, one inch, my brain is still developing and I don’t know what to say.
* * *
“Peace Lake!” Daddy announces when his Pontiac rattles onto the gravel road that winds down to the lake basin. Mrs. Wiggins moans and squeezes her eyes shut. She opens them again when we pull in. There are only two cars in the parking lot.
“Great! Nobody’s here,” Dad says, as he unloads the trunk. He hands Lauren the beach towels. Mom tells me to leave my books in the car. Judy says Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a boy’s book, but I don’t care. I wish I were Captain Nemo and had my own Nautilus to explore Peace Lake, and then I wouldn’t have to swim.
“Let’s draw, shall we?” Mom hands me her sketchpad and a pencil. “You can draw what you see here at the lake,” she suggests. “Or dinosaurs! Aren’t you studying dinosaurs in school? Just not imaginary scenes from the life of Jesus, okay?”
Gee, I only did that a couple, five or six, times. “Okay,” I mumble, and tuck the pad under my arm. “Thanks.”
While Mom unwraps the blankets swaddling her portable bar, Mrs. Wiggins walks past me to the beach, slower than usual. All of us watch her teeter and stumble through the rocks and driftwood before losing sight of her. We know she has finally reached the water when a flock of noisy ducks fly up and over our heads. A few minutes later she slowly brings me a stick.
Dad’s right, we shouldn’t have brought her.
“She got the stick. Maybe she isn’t as sick as we thought,” Mom says. She looks disappointed. Maybe she wants another pet. Chester, her favorite parakeet, used to sit on her easel while she painted; last year he sipped Mom’s turpentine and died.
“She’s slow,” Dad says, “but she seems to be enjoying herself. She still loves being here.” Lauren laughs when he grabs the kindling ax from the trunk of the car, takes a deep breath, and strikes a pose like Paul Bunyan. “Beware the sharks!” he warns before heading off to collect firewood. Dad always jokes about sharks, in Peace Lake—at the YWCA, even in Lauren’s old wading pool and the bathtub at home; any place there’s water.
“You girls know sharks don’t live in fresh water, right?” Mom asks.
Sure,