The Almanac Branch Read Free Page B

opened my eyes.
    Then he said, Have you ever cried backwards, Grace?
    â€œHuh?”
    Cried backwards, listen, it’s great. Open your eyes wide, and don’t move. It’s great, it’s a great way to cry, because nobody can see that you’re crying, just so good to know how to do it, in case you need to do it in the future sometime. So just be still, and what we’re going to do, it’ll be really neat.
    And he did, he came over, floated to the window, and I was looking straight at him he couldn’t have been more than a few feet away from me (he seemed smaller the closer he got) and he reached out with the tip of his finger toward my eyelid—my eyes were closed, I couldn’t keep them open, and yet I still could see him—and a stream of light came into the pupil of my eye. My mouth began to fill with liquid light, and he said, Swallow, and I swallowed, it was acrid, and I gulped it down.
    See you around, Grace, and I was still gulping when he swam back into the bark of the tree. I felt almost rapturous at having been allowed to commune with my friend without having had to pay the usual dues. My parents’ room was quiet, when I listened against the panel of my door. They were all asleep.
    We arrived on Shelter Island midafternoon. Gray clouds bore into the slate sky above. The ferry wake hypnotized a flow of gulls, and we stared down into the churning, engine-chafed water and watched the loading dock recede. The farmhouse was out past not one but two causeways, on Rams Island, as it was called, along a sparsely built beach road, and faced out to the white ocean. A mild breeze tripped across the flat, and I pulled my hair out of my mouth—there were always to be mist and air moving across the flat of the island here, buffeting the surface of Coecles Inlet and Shanty Bay. Faw and the boys unloaded, while Mother fidgeted with her wavy masses of hair. She touched the back of her sturdy hand to her lips, and caught her breath—having rummaged in her purse she realized she’d lost the keys. We stood before the front door on the deep green porch. It didn’t matter about the keys, the door swung open when I pushed against the handle.
    Inside the front room were shimmery cobwebs jeweled with flecks of sandy dust. Mrs. Merriam’s possessions were draped with sheets. The first-floor bedroom had been used by squatters. A boot missing its tongue lay at the foot of the stairs. Throughout there were signs of trespass and of trespassers’ lovemaking. A display of nature’s own encroachment took the form of a bald vine that had crept up from the cellar—imitating, it seemed to me, my ailanthus back in New York. It grasped at the maple-snipped sun in the oriel window. What was dingy melded with mystery in my darting mind.
    â€œI like it here,” I said.
    When I broke away to run upstairs and look out from the balcony to the sea, she said, “Grace, be careful,” and the way she said it made me realize that it was she who was afraid, and so I came back to her, looked at her, and saw she wasn’t able to look at me, so I followed her through the front room toward the kitchen.
    Here things were in no better shape. The faux-oriental kitchen linoleum was curling up around its appliances, the appliances were themselves in different states of disrepair—the impertinent Norge stove wheezing gas, the racks in the refrigerator hung with green, tobaccolike beards. The doors to the downstairs rooms would not stay closed, the silver “American”-emblazoned radiators banged and hissed. Even when it seemed like too much, there was more. The upstairs windows, where she went, me still gliding behind, whistled when she opened them, and their sun-grayed lace shook out the dust of who knew how many years of neglect.
    â€œMy God,” or something like that—and I said, “Mom, you’ll see, everything will be all right.”
    The place was, in a word,