Bird Lake Moon (4 page)

“Oh, man,” Mitch whispered fiercely.

Instinctively, he looked to the door and was grateful that he had closed it. A few long, painful seconds dragged by. No one came.

He quickly replaced the canister. It was a small mess, but still a mess. He felt anger toward Cherry all of a sudden, misguided, but strong. He found a dustpan and a broom and, with sharp, urgent movements, swept up the sugar. He dumped the sugar into a small brown-paper bag grabbed from a stack on one of the shelves. The last thing he wanted was for Cherry to know what had happened, so he took the bag with him.

Within minutes, he was there. On the intruders' front porch.

Think.

What should he do? What would be the best thing to do?

Without knowing why, Mitch emptied the bag onto the porch. The sugar was a miniature mountain of pure white. He crouched over it and tilted his head to one side, as if he were looking at a work of art. Then he flattened the pile with the side of his hand and traced the pattern of a soccer ball into the sugar with his finger. He drew a hexagon surrounded by a ring of pentagons.

Was that correct? He filled the remaining space with random lines. What he ended up with was a bit too oval shaped and lopsided, but he let it be. And it looked more like a geometric design than a soccer ball, but that added to the perplexing nature of it, he reasoned. Hoped.

He was remembering, once again, the one soccer game his father had come to.

A bird called raucously from a nearby tree, and he realized he'd been in a sort of trance.

He took a slow, deep breath. Beneath the design he carefully formed a number twelve, because he was twelve and because it would make the whole thing seem like a code of some sort. Mysterious. A dead bee lay just beyond the circumference of the sugar. With his pinkie, he nudged it next to the twelve. More mysterious. Sugar stuck to his sweaty finger; he licked it off without really tasting it. He crumpled the bag and held it in his fist.

As he rose to leave, two things caught his attention: his initials he'd carved into the railing the other day and a pair of swimming goggles neatly placed on the edge of the stoop. He picked up the goggles and ran toward his grandparents'. There was dew on the weedy grass, and he slipped twice but didn't fall.

When he reached the tangle of lilacs, he stopped. Camouflaged, he couldn't help casting a glance back, then glancing all around. His heart was drumming and his throat had gone dry. The lilacs, the flowers, were long past their prime, brown, like clusters of scorched popcorn. He debated snapping off a handful and adding them to his creation but decided against it. He could use them later.

He wondered what would happen next.

Everything was still, but in a strange way, as if he were looking and feeling through a filter.

He had started something in motion.

Thrilling.

The car didn't come back and didn't come back, and Mitch grew tired of waiting. But he knew that the intruders weren't gone for good: Their neon yellow kayak was lying on its side against the bushes near the birdbath like a giant electric banana, and several windows on both floors of the house had been left open.

Mitch's stomach rumbled, and he realized that he was hungry. He'd been moving furtively about the yard from spot to spot, places where he could see but not be seen. He decided to go inside to check out the refrigerator. He crossed the lawn and was rounding the corner of his grandparents' house when the telephone rang. Its muffled shrillness sounded out of place to him. At first the ringing seemed faraway, even dreamlike, a distant warning, not of his concern, and then he suddenly snapped into a new level of awareness. A deep, icy feeling clutched his stomach, and he was certain, absolutely certain, that it was his father calling. He raced along the garden, took the steps two at a time, and burst into the kitchen, as though he had been reeled in on a line.

Cherry met him just inside the entryway, her arm extended, the phone in her hand. An offering. “It's for you,” she said. “The phone's portable, of course,” she added. “But stay near the base or the reception gets fuzzy. I'll leave so you can have some privacy.”

With lifted eyebrows and wide eyes, Mitch took the phone. He spread his feet slightly and braced himself. After Cherry had left the room, he said, “Hello?” in a stiff, tentative voice.

“Hey, Mitch, it's Dad.”

I knew it
. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi.” A pause. “I miss you.”

Whose fault is that?
“Yeah. I miss you, too. Do—do you—” He hesitated. “Do you want to talk to Mom?”

“I want to talk to you.”

Silence stretched between them.

Mitch's father cleared his throat, “I want to take you out for dinner tonight. We'll go to that good hamburger place you like. Or wherever you want. Your choice. I'll pick you up around five.”

“I'll ask Mom.”

“I already did. We talked about it last night. She's okay with it.”

“She didn't tell me.”

“
I
wanted to tell you.”

“Oh.”
What else did you talk about?
“So is Mom going, too?”

“No, just the two of us. And bring your football. We can toss it around the parking lot.” Another pause, “I'll honk for you. I'll wait in the car.”

“Now do you want to talk to Mom?”
Please say yes
.

Mitch's father expelled a breath that seemed to have an edge and go on forever. “No,” he finally said. His voice had dropped to a loud whisper. “No need to.”

Mitch sucked on his swollen lip, replaying his father's modest, measured response to the last question.

“Oh,” said his father, “I've got a present for you. A cell phone. I thought you could use it, you know, under the circumstances, because Mom and I . . .”

Mitch listened intently, afraid he'd hear the words “are getting a divorce.” But the sentence was left unfinished. Nonetheless, one of those unspoken words formed in Mitch's mind, each letter as big as a house and made of stone: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

“Anyway . . . you
wanted
a cell phone, right?”

Not really
. “Mmm-hmm,” Mitch murmured with tight lips, his voice rising in a tight, fake sort of way because he was trying to hide his sadness. Then his mouth fell open; he didn't know what to say next.

“Well, bud, I'll see you later.” His father's tone was hushed.

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye. I love you, Mitch.”

Really?
“Love you, too.”
Come back. To stay
.

Mitch was reluctant to hang up, so one more time he said, “Bye.”

“Bye.”

That was it.

After the telephone call, Mitch shifted about moodily on the bed in the spare room, feeling sorry for himself. He'd missed the intruders' homecoming. He knew this because his mother had poked her head into the room and said, “I think there's a family staying in the house next door. They're swimming right now. I saw a boy about your age. Maybe the two of you could play together. Did you see him?”

“Yeah, I saw him. And I also saw that he had a mother
and
a father,” Mitch had replied, staring at the ceiling with stony eyes. When he'd turned toward the doorway to catch her reaction and perhaps apologize, she'd already left.

The weight of it all threatened to overwhelm him. He buried his face in his pillow, trying to screen out the world, but random thoughts and images swirled through his head. All the things he tried
not
to think about, were, of course, the things he did.

His father: How would their dinner together be? Would the word
divorce
be mentioned? Or, if Mitch did everything right, could it be the first step toward getting their old life restored? What would it take to get his father to spend the night?

His old house: What would happen to
it
? Would all of them move back eventually? Would he and his mother move back before school started in the fall?

The intruders: Had they seen the front porch? How had they reacted?

His splinter: What if it was infected? What if it gave him some dread disease?

The goggles: What should he do with them? He'd shoved them into one of the small zippered compartments in his backpack. He'd never stolen anything before; he vowed to give them back. But it would have to be done in a clever way, a way that would be useful, part of his plan.

Thinking about stealing caused his mind to drift to a boy at his school. Ross Liscum. Ross had been a bother, like Mitch's splinter, since Mitch was in kindergarten and Ross was a first grader. Ross was the kind of kid who cut in line, tripped people in the hallways, threw fists at sack lunches to crush them, cheated on tests, bragged repeatedly about his athletic abilities, and made venomous comments about other classmates' appearances, which made no sense to Mitch because Ross had a slightly deformed ear that looked like a fortune cookie. Just the kind of thing Ross would taunt others about.

Mitch had been Ross's victim on occasion (“It's
Miss
Sinclair!” Ross would say for no apparent reason), but not with the regularity that others suffered, thank goodness. Secretly, Mitch thought of him as Ross Lip Scum, but he'd never dare call him that.

When Mitch complained about Ross to his parents, they'd always given him the “ignore him” lecture and reminded Mitch that Ross's parents were divorced, as if this were reason enough to be a full-fledged jerk. For the moment, this comment shot to the forefront of Mitch's concerns and settled in. It stung him sharply. I've stolen something, he thought, because my parents are getting divorced.

Mitch tried to think about not thinking. But then the word
think
became all he could think about.
Think-think-think-think-think
. Like the rhythmic clicking of the ceiling fan, a tic in his brain.
Think-think-think-think-think
. Until he was apt to explode.

When he was younger and tried to empty his mind of unwanted worries, Mitch would recall roller coasters he'd ridden on, trying to re-create the different courses in complete detail—each turn, each climb, each drop.

This no longer worked, so he tried conjuring up the image of Julie McNight, who was in his homeroom and half of his classes last year. She was popular and pretty and not part of his circle of friends. And she was a very good writer.

For an assignment in English class just weeks before summer vacation, the students had been told to compose an autobiographical sketch. As part of hers, Julie had written: “I have black hair. But it is not as dramatically black and shiny as Mitch Sinclair's hair, which looks like crows' wings sweeping across his forehead and over his ears.” (Mitch had memorized this.)

She'd slid a copy of it, highlighted in lime green, onto his desk as she'd brushed past him the day the assignment was due. An attached Post-it note in the margin at the appropriate spot had the sentiment “I LIKE YOUR HAIR. OBVIOUSLY” printed on it in large rounded letters, followed by five exclamation points and a smiley face.

It felt good to remember the incident. He tried to concentrate on Julie—
her
black, shiny hair and lemony smell and the pink spot on her right cheek the size and shape of a little strawberry. He imagined touching the spot—something he could never do in real life.

Mitch still had the copy of the assignment Julie had given him, folded in half, kept safe in his backpack. He went to retrieve it but got sidetracked by the stolen goggles. A worrisome urgency overtook him, and he decided to return the goggles. Right now. He would not become another Ross Lip Scum.

The intruders were still swimming. The sounds of the happy family—laughter, splashing, and calls of “Marco!” and “Polo!”—rose like smoke and were carried off in the breeze. From the distance of the lilacs, shaded by the dusty leaves, Mitch scrutinized the goggles. He wound and twisted the rubber strap of the goggles around the eyepieces and a small rock he'd found at his feet, to form a tight, tangled knot. He gauged its heft by tossing it a few times from hand to hand. Then he broke out of the lilacs just long enough to hurl it toward the house with all his might. As sometimes happens when one least expects it, the thrown object hit a bull's-eye of sorts. The goggles landed in the birdbath, making the placement of them seem deliberate, like a message nailed to a tree, and Mitch felt certain relief.

It didn't last long; he would spend the rest of the day slipping in and out of a gloomy haze, awaiting his father.

The horn blared. Mitch was ready. Unexpectedly, his spirits had taken an upward turn. He was determined to start the night off right with his father. He shouted a quick good-bye to his mother, then walked out the back door and snuck around the house and along the driveway, weaving between the bushes that bordered it. He moved slowly, clinging to the perfectly manicured shrubs. The horn blared again. Again. Mitch heard the car door open. He bent down low, squinted at the ground, and counted to ten. When he craned his neck and looked ahead and saw the back of his father's familiar red Badger cap, his heart expanded, he felt buoyant. Yes! he thought. Ever so quietly, so as to not make the gravel crunch beneath his feet, he crept up on his father from behind.

The single moment that followed was loaded to overflowing.

Mitch yelled, “Hey!” and thrust out his hand to knock off his father's cap, just like the happy intruder son had done earlier. At that precise instant, Mitch's father jerked his head around (perhaps he'd heard the sound of approaching footsteps), and so Mitch ended up striking his father in the nose and sending his sunglasses skittering across the driveway.

Mitch was embarrassed beyond belief, and to make matters worse, he saw that his father was growing a beard and a mustache. He looked so different. Sort of like his father, but sort of not. He looked strange. The father he knew was obscured, the way Cherry's garden wall was obscured by vines. Was he trying to be a new person?