The Excellent Lombards(68)

They stared up at me, one after the next. There I am sitting way up high on a bale with the basket of kittens, splintered light coming through the cracks of the barn. The rope is hanging from a beam, the thick braid we used to swing from, that delirious long back-and-forth. Someone had removed it a few years before, May Hill, we’d thought. William is down below, making a pulley device to get water up to my perch, to save me. He’s wearing a junior tool belt, bent over his work. Even though in my hiding place darkness had not yet fallen I shone my light on the photographs. They seemed to have appeared out of creation or maybe years before I had stashed them in the book. However they’d materialized, I’d fallen straight down into the barn scene, MF Lombard no longer in her dugout. In one of the pictures William is looking up at me, the girl with the cats, as if he’s worried, as if it’s almost too late for the rescue, he knows he must hurry.

Stephen then occurred to me, Stephen himself standing in the door of the granary, watching us. Studying us no doubt for quite some time. Had he taken the photographs as a way to insert himself, just for a minute, into our childhood? Wanting to be us, to have us, trying somehow to—what? Could a grown man have such a hopeless wish, trying to get back there? Once I had that thought I scrambled to get out of the hole. I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to someday have the hopeless wish, trying to get back, taking pictures—and longing. Longing, I couldn’t bear all the longing that was already in me. And to come, all of it to come. I was running at first and stumbling. As much as I knew our woods it was still possible to go astray in the thickets and so I went in circles.

As I walked and walked other questions came to mind, one prompting the next and the next. What if soon we were unable to pay the taxes on the four hundred acres? What if a multimillionaire bought the woods, the houses, razing the apples trees for piano key subdivisions? That little tin cup we’d once found long ago, the cup we’d discovered and reburied, cemented over for a garage, never again found by a boy and girl? I wouldn’t think of it, would not imagine the classic and lugubrious farm auction scene turning into our real and saddest of memories, the closing of the door for the last time, getting into the car, turning back to look. One more look. I had to bend over, couldn’t walk—one last look and going down the road. Nothing left but the Stephen Lombard photographs.

I don’t know how many minutes or if it was for hours I wandered like that. When I got back to my camp the light was fading. Was Philip our savior? Was it true, what my mother had said, that May Hill was providing for our future? I felt as if my mind might rupture—how long, how long was it going to take William to figure out where I was? I could already hear the scratchings of nighttime, voles scurrying, deer delicately making their way along their narrow routes, the plaintive cry of a little lost bird who had foolishly stayed behind in winter. And always, in the woods, there must be the call of the owl, the demanding Who who?

Really, how long would it take William? It should not have been so difficult for him. If he wanted to go to Minnesota that badly he should think carefully about where MF Lombard was with the car keys. It made me so angry, again, that I’d had to resort to this kind of tactic. It should not have been necessary! And why had Gloria left us years before? She should start calling for me now, coming to find me, rather than living on Cortez Island with her own baby, a girl named Sophia.

Four o’clock had passed and five o’clock and six o’clock. Where was he? How dare he not find me. How dare he keep me waiting in the cold, doing the taxing job of holding my ire at the boiling point. It should have been a cinch to find me—how stupid could he be?

At six thirty I crawled out to do my business—look what you’ve reduced me to. Once again I tried to get comfortable, tried to get back the warmth I’d lost, and when I was sick, too, when I’d been so sick. But I would stay, I would stay the night, I’d stay for two nights if I had to, if William was so brainless he couldn’t find the car keys right in the hole in the woods. I was making my resolve when finally I heard the bushwhackers. Ten minutes past seven o’clock. It was my father who was calling. “Mar-lee-een. Mar-leeeeeeen! Are you out here?”

Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.

“Marlene!” A big sharp shout.

They were drawing closer. I burrowed deeper into the duvet. What was going to happen?—that secretly delightful question. Before I could entertain it further they were on the lip of the chasm, their headlamps blinding me.

“Jesus Christ.” William spit the name.

“It’s okay,” my father said to him. “Come on out, Marlene.”

Ho-hum, I acted as if I didn’t see them, as if they were not present. I opened my book since their headlamps were now providing me with perfectly adequate light.

“Frankie—!” William was too angry to say more.

“Oh, hallo,” I said.

“It would be considerate—” He was so worked up he was starting to cry, my brother. “It would be—” Not only had it taken him forever to find me, he also couldn’t manage to speak in complete sentences. How in the world did he think he was going to conduct himself at college? “Nice,” he hissed. “If you could give us the car keys.”

“Marlene,” my father said, “we’re all pretty tired.”

That was their problem, not mine. They wanted to be rested and happy, they had only to get a basket and come into the woods.