When We Were Animals(39)

*



But those were parents who had intervened against the wishes of their children. Their stories were different from mine. I was a half-breed. I wasn’t some wild creature. I was good. I was daylight and homework and logical answers. I was no tide to be puppeted by the moon. I had my mother’s blood. Maybe the night before had been an aberration. You didn’t have to give in to every impulse that stirred your blood. You could be better.

I decided, whatever I had become, not to go outside the next night. I was determined not to yield to whatever disease was growing inside me.

When it got dark, I found my father reading in the living room.

“Good night,” I said.

He looked at his watch.

“It’s early,” he said.

“I know. I’m worn out.”

“Good Christmas, Lumen?”

“Good Christmas, Dad. Good Christmas for you?”

“Great Christmas. Among the best.”

He was a sweet, oblivious man. He was the kind of man you wanted to be good for. How could you want to damage such a man with the truth of things?

So I had to hide it from him—whatever it was. Up in my room, I shut my door and put my desk chair in front of it. I had seen people do this in movies, though my door didn’t seem any more secure for it. Through my window, I could see the moon through the tree branches, low on the horizon.

My skin was itchy all over. I was feeling ragged and burned. There was a fan in my closet that was meant for the hot summer months—but I got it out and plugged it in and sat in front of it with my eyes closed, the air making me feel like I was moving at high speed, on my way to someplace grand and dramatic.

Once, when I was much younger, I had asked my father what my mother had done all those nights when everyone had gone breach around her. He laughed and took me onto his lap, and this is what he said: “Do you want to know what she did? She sewed rag dolls. She was the most amazing seamstress, your mother. The dolls she made, they were exquisite. She became known for them all over town. Children would come by her house and stand beneath her window, and she would throw dolls down to them.”

I always loved that story, and it wasn’t until I was older that I began to wonder why none of my mother’s rag-doll creations were still around. And then, later, my father’s story became even stranger to me because of its resemblance to something I read in Little Women. Still, I treasured the image of my mother sitting beneath a lamp at night sewing dolls, and I wondered what comparable thing I could do.

I put my headphones on and listened to some music at volume level seventeen—I normally wouldn’t allow myself any volume over ten for fear of ruining my eardrums. But there was a bustle in my head that needed drowning out.

On the wall over my bed there was a mismatched seam in the wallpaper, and tonight, for some reason, it bothered me. I picked at it without thinking, digging my fingernails underneath it until I had ripped away a whole flap. My hands wanted something to do. I made myself stop and reaffix the flap with white glue. But then I found myself winding my fingers around strands of hair and tugging them out of my scalp.

To keep my hands occupied, I opened my sketch pad and started to draw a map. It was a map of a place I didn’t know. Sometimes those were the best ones. You started with a river and grew a town up around it. You discovered the place as you created it. Sometimes there were surprises.

But tonight, for the first time, I was irritated by my little fictional operettas. The music in my ears seemed mechanical and false. The map emerging under my artless hands seemed flat, predictable. I began to wish I knew how to paint scenes rather than just maps. I wanted to paint like Edward Hopper. I wanted to show the depth of the dark by delivering just a small, broken segment of light. I wanted to look into windows from the outside.

I was hot, and there was nothing the fan could do about it. My skin itched, the kind of itch that made diving into a thorny shrub sound like a delicious dream.

It was only nine o’clock. I went to the window. It was safe, I imagined, just to look. I renewed my resolution not to set even one foot outside. The moon was still low. I could see it superimposed over my reflection on the pane of glass, yet still very far away. I pressed my forehead to the glass and used my hands as a visor in order to see more, to get closer, but my breath quickly fogged the view.

I unlocked the window and slid it upward. It was just something I did. It required no thought or bargaining.

I knew a rhyme that had always seemed powerful to me. If I spoke it aloud, maybe I could still be saved, even with the window open. So I leaned as far as I could out the window into the night and repeated the rhyme over and over.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.



I leaned out the window, and the air sighed upon my itchy skin.

Were these, then, the pathways to damnation—and was this why they were so difficult for people to resist?

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

My window was in a dormer, and I crawled through until half of me was lying on the downward slope of the roof.

But my legs were still inside the house. Inside the little crooked house. No walking a crooked mile tonight—not without those little crooked legs.