Peaceable Kingdom Read Free

was real and what she was faking.
    Reynaldo had the run of my sister’s room, no one dared open the door. After school she’d lie belly down on her bed, cheek to cheek with Reynaldo. And in a way it was lucky that my father couldn’t see that.
    One night the phone rang. Mother covered the receiver and said, “Thank you, Lord. It’s a boy.”
    It was a boy who had been at the party and seen my sister rescue Reynaldo. His name was Greg; he was a college student, studying for a business degree.
    After he and my sister went out a few times, Mother invited Greg to dinner. I ate roast beef and watched him charm everyone but me. He described my sister grabbing the iguana out of its torturer’s hands. He said, “When I saw her do that, I thought, This is someone I want to know better.” He and my parents talked about her like some distant mutual friend. I stared hard at my sister, wanting her to miss Jimmy, too, but she was playing with her food, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
    Greg had a widowed mother and two younger sisters; he’d gotten out of the draft by being their sole support. He said he wouldn’t go anyway, he’d go to Canada first. No one mentioned Reynaldo, though we could hear him scrabbling jealously around my sister’s room.
    Reynaldo wasn’t invited on their dates and neither, obviously, was I. I knew Greg didn’t drive onto the ice or break into furniture stores. He took my sister to Godard movies and told us how much she liked them.
    One Saturday my sister and Greg took Reynaldo out for a drive. And when they returned—I waited up—the iguana wasn’t with them.
    “Where’s Reynaldo?” I asked.
    “A really nice pet shop,” she said. And then for the first time I understood that Jimmy was really dead.
    Not long after that my father died. His doctors had made a mistake. It was not a disease of the retina but a tumor of the brain. You’d think they would have known that, checked for that right away, but he was a scientist, they saw themselves in him and didn’t want to know. Before he died he disappeared, one piece at a time. My sister and I slowly turned away so as not to see what was missing.
    Greg was very helpful throughout this terrible time. Six months after my father died, Greg and my sister got married. By then he’d graduated and got a marketing job with a potato-chip company. Mother and I lived alone in the house—as we’d had, really, for some time. My father and sister had left so gradually that the door hardly swung shut behind them. Father’s Buick sat in the garage, as it had since he’d lost his vision, and every time we saw it we thought about all that had happened.
    My sister and Greg bought a house nearby; sometimes Mother and I went for dinner. Greg told us about his work and the interesting things he found out. In the Northeast they liked the burnt chips, the lumpy misshapen ones, but down South every chip had to be pale and thin and perfect.
    “A racial thing, no doubt,” I said, but no one seemed to hear, though one of Mother’s favorite subjects was race relations down South. I’d thought my sister might laugh or get angry, but she was a different person. A slower, solid, heavier person who was eating a lot of chips.
    One afternoon the doorbell rang, and it was Jimmy Kowalchuk. It took me a while to recognize him; he didn’t have his beard. For a second—just a second—I was afraid to open the door. He was otherwise unchanged except that he’d got even thinner, and looked even less Polish and even more Puerto Rican.
    He was wearing army fatigues. I was glad Mother wasn’t home. He gave me a hug, my first ever from him, and lifted me off the ground. He said no, he was never dead, never even missing.
    He said, “Some army computer glitch, some creep’s clerical error.” My father’s death had made it easier to believe that people made such mistakes, and for one dizzying moment I allowed myself to imagine that maybe Jimmy’s being alive meant my