Wild Things Page 5

  “How come?”

  Henry shrugged. “I’m not easy to live with.”

  “Me either.”

  “No?”

  I shook my head. “Mama said I was the most cussed person she’d ever met.”

  “Is it true?” he said, turning the tables.

  “I’ve got a temper.”

  “Welcome to the Royster family.”

  “Which wife was that on the phone?”

  “Number two. Susan. The woman I thought I ought to marry. Beautiful, smart, the kind of woman who could take me places. In our case, straight to the devil.”

  “What happened to number one?” I said.

  “Who knows? She took the settlement and ran.”

  “And number three?”

  His voice softened. “Cancer,” he whispered, in a subject-closed way.

  “I’m sorry.” I felt bad for bringing it up. “Any kids?”

  “You’re the first.”

  This startled me, and I wasn’t sure whether in a good way or not. Henry’s kid. I’d have to think on that. I moved closer to see the book he was reading. “What’s that about?”

  He turned the book around and set it on the edge of the bed so I could see. An old lady, wrinkled as a prune and dressed in black, stared back at me. On the facing page stood a low house on a vast desert. I studied the woman’s face: old but strong, with piercing eyes.

  “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Henry said. “She lived in the New Mexico desert. She had a temper, too.”

  I turned the pages and saw color pictures of painted deserts, big flowers, churches and animal skulls, and more photographs of her house and the land around it, called Ghost Ranch, the caption said. The landscape was large-minded and peaceful, a place I might like to go.

  “I like your room,” I said.

  “Fred said you looked around.”

  “He said I was nosy.”

  “Curiosity is a good thing.”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “Fred was teasing you. This is your house now too, Zoë. Make yourself at home. Look at anything you like.”

  “I can read your books?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s good,” I said, looking up, “because I already borrowed one. About a Japanese boy who drew cats.”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded as if remembering. “A good story,” he said. “True.”

  “It really happened?”

  “A different kind of true,” he said, pointing to his heart. “True here.”

  I didn’t tell him I hadn’t read it yet.

  “Books are so much easier than people,” he said, taking in all the books around the room.

  I’d always thought that, but I didn’t know anyone else did.

  I reached into my T-shirt pocket, took out the ten and two twenties he’d given me earlier, and set them on the bed. “To help with Mama’s bill.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I saw in your checkbook. I know you paid it. Five thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, now five thousand four hundred even. It’ll take me a while, but I’ll pay you back.”

  “You were nosing around, weren’t you?” Henry took the bills, folded them, and reached across to slip them back into my pocket. “Let’s just say that paying your mother’s bill made me feel better about all those years I didn’t know about your father and mother and you, all right?”

  “How’d you find out? About me, I mean?”

  “A man came here one day and told me. Your mother’s friend Ray.”

  I made a face.

  Henry went on. “He knew about your father, Owen, from your mother. She told Ray that you were Owen’s child. He figured out the rest and found me himself.”

  I’d never heard anyone speak my daddy’s name. Before today, he was just “your father,” “your uncle’s half-brother.” There weren’t even pictures of him that anybody knew of. Hearing his name made him seem, for the first time, like a flesh-and-blood person.

  Ray told you all this for nothing? I nearly asked, but I stopped myself. Ray never did anything for free. Instead I asked, “You went to pay the hospital today?”

  “Yes, and then to my lawyer’s to take care of some paperwork. That’s why it took all day.”

  I thought of all the hospitals Mama had stayed in, all pretty much the same as Rose Hill. Locked doors and windows, halls that smelled like cigarettes or pee, and always somebody screaming. Did anybody get well in those places? I was glad Henry had gone alone. I never wanted to see a place like that again.

  “Your mother’s affairs were …” He seemed to be trying to find a softer word than the one I read in his eyes. “Messy,” he said finally.

  “I thought …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Leaving me hadn’t occurred to him. Not today, anyway.

  But he knew without my saying it. “I won’t abandon you, Zoë, not intentionally. Some of the legal papers I signed today—” He glanced at the clock on his night table. It was after one in the morning. “Some of the legal papers I signed yesterday insure that if anything unintentional ever happens to me, everything I have belongs to you. Everything. This house, the land, the unsold work. Susan’s on the installment plan only as long as I’m alive.”

  I nodded a little and stared into his tired gray eyes. I wanted to believe him, but I’d believed too many grown-ups’ promises, all broken. What grown-ups said and what they actually did never matched or even came close. I tried to be happy for all Henry had done, but I knew he’d change his mind in the end, move on, chump out like all the rest.

  “I’m real appreciative for all the money you’ve paid, everything you’ve done.”

  He sighed. “I wasn’t asking for gratitude,” he said. “I was trying—”

  The phone rang like a shrill voice. Anger flared in Henry’s eyes, and he seemed to forget I was standing there. He snatched up the receiver and held it away from his ear. A raging female shrieked, “How dare you hang up on me, you miserable—” Henry slammed down the phone, wrapped the cord twice around his hand, and yanked that sucker right out of the wall.

  Just like that.

  I must’ve looked scared, because he glanced at the severed cord and looked embarrassed. “Sorry about that,” he said. “What were we saying?”

  “It wasn’t important,” I said. I headed for the stairs so my clear-as-glass expression wouldn’t show what else I was thinking: That if he’d hung up on her, he might hang up on me. “Night, Uncle Henry.”

  “Sweet dreams, Zo’.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Sweet as they can be.”

  4

  “Do I get a last request?”

  Henry was leaning back in his captain’s chair at the dinner table, his feet in the chair beside him, sipping a cup of coffee. “You have to go to school.”

  I poked at my untouched dinner with a fork and didn’t answer. I’d decided on a hunger strike, though Fred had cooked meat loaf, creamed potatoes, and buttered baby peas and I could’ve eaten every bite.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I’m not deaf,” I said. “Or dumb.”

  “No one said you were.”

  “Then I don’t see why I have to go. I tested higher than anybody ever has on those tests. That guidance lady said so. She said I did as well as a high school kid.”

  “On some parts, not others.”

  “I never had to go before. I learned fine on my own. I can do that here. You can check me.”

  “I’m not arguing about this anymore,” Henry said. “We each have our work to do. I’m going to my studio every morning, and you’re going to school. Even if there’s nothing they can teach you, it will be good for you to be with other kids.”

  “You don’t spend time with anybody but me and Fred and those stupid sculptures!”

  “I don’t claim to be a role model. But I’m responsible for you now. And I’ll be taking you to school at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”

&nbs
p; “You promised you wouldn’t leave me!”

  “Abandonment and education are not the same thing.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and narrowed my eyes. “I don’t feel good. I feel a fatal and highly contagious disease coming on.”

  Henry seemed to be expecting this. “That I know something about.”

  He got his medical bag from the top shelf of the hall closet and slipped a thermometer in my 98.6° mouth, took my perfectly normal blood pressure, and checked my angry heartbeat with an ice-cold stethoscope.

  “I’ll just leave my bag out in case you’re not feeling well in the morning,” he said, and it took all my willpower not to smack him.

  “I have some paperwork to do,” he said then, and headed to his study. He left the door open so he could keep tabs on me.

  “I’ll run off,” I whispered when I knew he couldn’t hear. “And you won’t find me.”

  I stayed in my room while he worked late. Around eleven, I crept downstairs. He was busy at his computer but turned an ear to the creaking stairs. I ran back up, closed my bedroom door, and stewed in my window seat, plotting my escape. I thought of the cat outside in the weeds. He and I both had experience making ourselves scarce. Henry didn’t understand who he was dealing with. But he’d soon see.

  Henry climbed the stairs near midnight, but he didn’t go right to bed. His silhouette stretched black against the light from his windows in the backyard below. His looming shadow gave me the creeps. I imagined myself a condemned prisoner in the Henry Royster Maximum Security Prison, complete with searchlights, sirens, guard towers, and vicious, patrolling dogs. Plus the sheriff had my fingerprints. I was doomed.

  Others had tried and failed to make me go to school, starting with Lester when I was six. Fourteen stitches and a perfect, permanent impression of my teeth in his right arm had shown him the error of his thinking. A year and a half later, sixty percent of my track winnings convinced Manny that the school of life was as good as formal education. Charlie liked that I read to his mother, and reasoned that I was learning plenty while I did. After that, none of the others cared if I went to school or spent my mornings reading and writing at home, my afternoons and evenings in the library. They liked having the housework done, and Mama sure wasn’t going to do it. They’d all skipped school when they were kids, so why shouldn’t I? Heck, most of them didn’t even wonder where I was unless dishes piled up in the sink, their underwear drawer went empty, or there wasn’t any coffee to ease their morning hangovers.

  Henry was different. He had money and brains, in addition to legal papers and a fixed idea that he was responsible for me and in charge. My life savings or a few bite marks were not going to change his mind.

  My best hope was that he’d hurry up and fall asleep, and once he had, I’d grease the door hinges with salad oil and slip deep into the woods. But Henry’s light stayed on and on. My eyelids grew heavy as stones. I sat up taller in the window seat, jerked myself awake, and pinched my cheeks till they burned. It wasn’t any good. Sometime around one-thirty, I fell sound asleep.

  It seemed like seconds later when I sat bolt upright in my bed. Henry must’ve found me in the window seat and put me under the covers. Why couldn’t he be like the others? Let me keep up my own schooling? Do as I liked?

  My clock said four-thirty. It was still dark out, and Henry’s lights were finally off. I dressed quickly in my old clothes. I said good-bye to my room and took a long look at the bookcase Fred had fixed for me, my new outfits still in their bags, and all the books Henry had let me borrow. I’d run off for a day, maybe two, three at the outside, just till he learned he wasn’t the boss of me. The others had learned. He’d come around in time, and when he did, I’d come back. I stared up the stairs at the third floor, threw one leg over the banister, and slid soundlessly down.

  I hugged the walls, keeping to the less creaky part of the floor next to the baseboards. Ever so quietly I moved a kitchen chair to stand on, greased the front-door hinges with olive oil, and worked the door open inch by inch till the oil sank in. Then I slipped silently outside.

  I stood on the porch for a minute, pleased at my success. The autumn nights had turned cooler, and I shivered a little, missing the warmth of my bed. I walked as far as the crate and saw both of the cat’s bowls still full of food and water. I didn’t feel him near. I crept toward the weeds, hoping to catch sight of him. But his napping spot was bare, the weeds tamped flat. The big trucks coming and going all week to load Henry’s sculptures had likely chased him off, I hoped not for good. Lately he’d let me get closer. If Henry stayed pigheaded about school, the cat and I could live in the woods together, happy, wild, and free.

  I followed a faint trail through the blackberry brambles down toward a little footbridge that crossed the creek. Even in the dark I smelled cedar and the musk of dry leaves under my feet. This was how the cat knew the world, what he studied to live and make his way. He didn’t need schools or teachers or other cats. He read the wind, took his lessons from the woods, studied the chapters of the moon and stars, needing nobody and nothing, living the life I wanted for myself.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of freedom. As I did, something stirred in the woods behind me. I spun around and stared. Not twenty feet ahead, a ghost stood on the creek bridge, staring back at me—at least what seemed like a ghost. There, nearly close enough for me to rush forward and touch her, stood a snow-white deer, slender and small—a yearling, to look at her—with a pink nose, pale eyes, and hooves as gray as ashes.

  Either I was seeing things or the moonlight was playing tricks. It had been a long night and I hadn’t had much sleep. But the deer stayed put, taking me in as though I was a vision every bit as strange. Maybe she was a spirit, I thought, the wandering shade of some uneasy soul. Lester had told me ghost stories about the restless roamings of the unquiet dead, what he called haints, eerie stories I’d loved. But as soon as I had that thought, the pale creature shook her head as if she’d heard what I was thinking. She stamped and pawed the bridge planks, four solid hooves knocking against solid wood. Then she lifted her pink nose and sniffed me on the air.

  She seemed more curious than afraid, and by the way she kept looking back over her shoulder I gathered she wasn’t alone. Her attention was split between me and something else—another animal, I thought. An owl in the woods hooted once, twice, then a third time, and finally the deer turned to the woods and bounded off toward the sound. I took off after her as fast as I could.

  I quickly lost sight of her, and followed her sound. Her light running barely stirred the leaves, but I heard the other, heavier animal catching up to her, then both of them running full out ahead of me. I kept my arms raised to push back the branches, but twigs lashed my face and hands and slowed me down. I ran deeper and deeper in, the woods growing denser and darker, the moonlight barely shining through the treetops. The deer and her friend ran like the wind while I stumbled and snagged my sweater on every bramble and branch.

  Finally I stopped to listen and didn’t hear them at all. For a few minutes I moved ahead toward where I’d last heard them, but it wasn’t any good. Either they’d run beyond earshot or they’d stopped to keep their hiding place hidden. They wouldn’t be found unless they cared to be. I heard only the wind in the treetops, the far rushing of the stream.

  5

  The next thing I knew, it was morning. I woke up in my bed, dressed in my escape clothes, without the first idea of how I’d gotten back. I remembered getting lost in Henry’s woods, pausing to rest against the trunk of a big tree, and having this weird dream about my daddy. At least I understood him to be my daddy, the way you understand things in dreams. The white deer stood close by looking curious, and Daddy seemed put out with her, I didn’t know why. Both of them stood over me for a long time like they were trying to decide what to make of me. Then Daddy carried me back to Henry’s, up the stairs to my room.

  Maybe a minute after I woke up, Henry was standing over my bed, looking pu
t out himself and sounding all sarcastic, saying he didn’t know too many people who slept in their clothes, but it struck him as a fine morning time-saver. Had I eaten my cereal the night before, too, or would I like a bowl before school? Guess he’d been the one to find me in the woods and haul me back.

  I kept up my silent protest against education over an oatmeal breakfast and all the way to the Sugar Hill City School’s front office, where trouble started right away. According to the scores from tests I’d taken the week before, I was high-school level in reading and writing and fifth-grade level in math. I hated math, so it was amazing I’d done that well—probably thanks to Manny and our time at the track. In spite of my better test scores, though, and despite the guidance counselor’s opinion that I’d be happiest in sixth grade, the county had a rule that “all students should be schooled with peers their own age, exceptions made only in rare circumstances.” The assistant superintendent, a bored-looking woman who talked like a robot, showed Henry the rule and didn’t even look at me. She said because I’d never attended school, I was “deficient in age-appropriate socialization,” and she wouldn’t recommend any exception in my case. When Henry asked her to rethink her decision, she told me to wait in the hall. I left the door open a crack and heard her say, “Test results can’t always be trusted. Most likely, considering Zoë’s near-feral upbringing, her higher numbers are a fluke.” Not only did she think I was a savage, she thought I’d cheated somehow.

  “You know the thing that burns me most about being a kid?” I yelled at Henry when we got in the truck. “The worst thing about being a kid is that people twice my size with half my brains get to run my life.”

  Henry sighed. “Wait till you start voting.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “That woman’s an idiot,” he went on. “I could send you to boarding school if you want.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “There are some fine boarding schools, but nothing decent nearby.”

  “I just got here,” I said. “You want to send me away?”

  “I do not. It’s the last thing on earth I want, and the last thing you need. But I don’t like the alternatives, and neither do you.”