When We Were Animals(24)

“Who said that?”

“She did.”

“Rose lies. She’s lying.”

“I don’t think she is.”

He didn’t say anything. His eyes searched the room. He was in a panic about being caught. I hated him for making me feel sorry for him. He reached out to me, and I pulled myself back so violently that I banged my shoulder against one of my shelves and a pile of books came tumbling down. I was embarrassed and angry.

“Why did you do it?” I said.

“I didn’t—”

“You did. I know what breachers do. They run in the woods. They beat one another up. They have sex together. Isn’t that what happens?”

“Lumen—”

“I thought you liked me.”

“I do. So much you don’t even know.”

“That’s not what liking looks like.”

“You don’t understand. When you’re out there…you don’t—”

“Yeah, I know. I got it. I’m a girl. I’m a nice girl. I’m the opposite of Rose Lincoln. She’s the kind of girl you have sex with, and I’m the kind of girl you do math problems with.”

“Stop it. It’s not—”

“Yes, it is. I know it is. You’re a sweetheart with me. So kind, so gentlemanly.” I was crying by now. I knew because I could feel the tears on my cheeks. And I was embarrassed, which made the tears come even faster. “I’m like the thing you worship. The thing you put on a shelf and dust every week. Don’t take Lumen down from her shelf—you’re liable to get your fingerprints all over her. Let’s keep her from anything ugly. The ugly’s just for grown-ups. She can’t handle the ugly—”

“Stop!”

He said it loud, loud enough to jar everything into sudden silence. My father was downstairs, and I was afraid he’d heard it. I didn’t like the idea of dragging him into my pathetic little-girl world. I listened for a few moments to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Then I looked to the window. It was the third and final night of Hollow Moon.

“You better go,” I said, sniffling and wiping the tears from my face with my palms. “It’ll be dark soon.”

“I’m going,” he said. “But you should know—you’re better than me. You’re better than all of us.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be better,” I said. “Get out. Just get out. You don’t want to be a danger to me.”

*



That night I stuffed cotton balls in my ears and pulled the blankets over my head. I went to beautiful places in my head. I was part of everything I touched, and the world was glad to have me on its surface. I imagined myself on top of a mountain in Switzerland. I looked out over the wide valleys and saw no towns and no roads and no travelers. There was no one around to be surprised or disappointed about what I was or what I was not.

I was alone and unfearful.

*



In the morning, as my father and I sat at the kitchen table—he reading the paper and stirring his coffee, I ignoring my unappetizing bowl of whole-grain cereal—I asked him what it was like to go breach.

“It’s not something for you to worry about,” he said, not looking up from his newspaper.

“You mean because it won’t happen to me?”

I forget where it started, this mutual belief that I was unbreachable. Was it something he told me as a child? Or was it something I suggested to him that he picked up on? We had lived so long, he and I, with the consensual reluctance to give up the fancies of childhood—and now I didn’t know if this was one of them. Simply put, we did not talk about such things.

“I mean,” he said, “because it’s not something to worry about. Like the weather. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, whether you fret about it or not.”

I knew this to be true, but I wanted more information.

“But you went through it. Do you remember it? What was it like?”


He sipped his coffee and lowered the cup slowly to the table. Then he folded his newspaper twice and leaned forward to look at his daughter straight-on. His eyes were very large, with pale crescents of fatigue beneath them.

“Do you remember,” he said, “when you were maybe five years old, and you asked me about death? You wanted to know where your mother had gone. You asked if you would die and if I would die, and I told you it was an inevitability, and then we looked up the word inevitability in the dictionary?”

“No,” I said.

“It was one of those conversations you dread having as a parent. For years before it happens, you lose sleep trying to plan for it. But there it was. You wanted to know what it was like where your mommy was.”

He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I recognized the symptoms of trying not to tear up. I looked down at my cereal to save him embarrassment.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I told you I didn’t know what it was like. And do you want to know what you said?”

“What? What did I say?”

“You said—very matter-of-fact, as though you were quite positive about it—you said, ‘Wherever it is, it probably has curtains.’”

He laughed. I laughed, too. Though it sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered if he had told me that story before. And if he had, why hadn’t I remembered it? Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.