Even though I was relieved that we didn't find the girl, I still worried. I couldn't guess what Audra was planning to do, and she wouldn't tell me anything.
I kept thinking that I would show her the words in the yellow notebook, the messages that had come to me, only me. But I also didn't want to share them. If I told someone else, the words might stop coming. I think I was also saving the secret of those messages, in case I needed it, to show Audra that I knew things, too, that I should not be left behind.
I started to worry that the words in the yellow notebook might fade away, or disappear, so I began to copy them into another notebook. That's how I began to write this all down, so I wouldn't lose anything. And the afternoon I started copying it, sitting at my desk in my room, I found new writing, a blank page that wasn't blank anymore.
The sea is a flat stone without any
scratches, a fairy tale is a made-up story,
history is a story of the before, and even a
made-up story is made up of real things.
Does static really mean stillness, a lack
of motion? We never stop moving, we are
always here, listening; still here and yet far
from still. Different worlds are all around
us, some easier to see, some too distant,
too far beyond. Hello, we are interested in
you. You're a nice smooth girl, a person.
Girls slip and shift; they disappear, they
can become another person. People band
together for protection or they don't even
know why, and we think it's the tenderest
thing when members of different species
befriend one another. A kitten and a
monkey, a duck and a cow, a dog and a
chicken. We find this so surprising, and feel
that it demonstrates something important
about kindness, and how natural it is when
we let it happen.
Even though the writing was cursive, every now and then a letter didn't fit, like a capital A in the middle of a word. It was ragged, the words sometimes stretched out, sometimes crushed together. It was like no one's handwriting I'd ever seen, and the paper was smudged, dirt rubbed into it from the hand dragging along, writing the letters. I wondered whose hand that was, who wrote those words—yet even then I could feel that the messages came from somewhere else, beyond the places and people I knew, to find their way to me. Only to me. And it was true that since I'd received the messages I hadn't felt so agitated, hadn't felt the agitation come over me. The messages were confusing and calming at the same time.
I sat there, copying the new words. It was late in the afternoon; I looked up at my bookcase, to check if there were other forgotten notebooks, but there were only my encyclopedias, my books about animals.
Next to my newer books were books that were passed down from Audra, which were too young for me. I had no one to pass them down to, so they stayed in my room. The Boxcar Children and Island of the Blue Dolphins and Beezus and Ramona—we'd gone to Beverly Cleary Elementary, and in the park near our house there were statues, one of Henry Huggins and his dog, Ribsy, one of Ramona. Audra and I used to play Beezus and Ramona; I stopped liking that game when Ramona started seeming like a brat to me. And then we'd play Little House on the Prairie—I was Laura and Audra was Mary, and I described everything to her because she went blind. I led her through the house, blindfolded, all around the neighborhood, and she held on to my arm, unable to see, unable to do the simplest thing without my help.
Looking at my shelves, thinking of Audra, made me miss her, made me want to talk to her. I finished my copying, hid the yellow notebook in the bookshelf, then stood and crossed the hall.
I pushed her door open. The empty room smelled damp, like wet clothes and dirt, and it felt quieter, the air a soft hiss in my ears. There was a new lock on the window, though by that time I think they'd given up on the locks because she always found a way out. Above her bed, where her hands had been outlined in black marker, there was now another pair of hands, a little higher. Larger hands.
I stood for a moment in the doorway, not going in, and then I felt Mom, behind me, in my parents' room. I turned, but she didn't see me. She was sitting at the computer desk, her side to me, and her face was glowing red from the computer screen, then orange, then blue as the pattern changed. Her mouth moved, but made no sounds. She wore headphones over her ears, and her hair was pulled back tight with a rubber band, which made her head look smaller, her eyes squinted down.
She was barefoot, too, sitting at the computer. All the colors on the screen burst and twisted and unfolded from each other so slowly. Circles and swooping curves, and she sat perfectly still and stared into them, her eyes half-closed.
These are visualizers, these things she does. I knew that if I talked to her she probably wouldn't hear me, or maybe she was ignoring me. I knew in her headphones there was soft music with no voices, so soft that it's hardly music at all. Mom had tried to get me to do it. She said it was a meditation, refreshing like sleep only even better than sleep. She also has a light shaped like a triangle that is supposed to shift her rhythms, to help her sleep, that she sometimes sets next to her at the dinner table. It tries to convince her body that the sun hasn't gone down.
"Vivian!" she suddenly said, not quite turning around. She'd seen me in the reflection of the screen. "That's creepy, sneaking up on me."
"I was just standing here."
Now her headphones were off, she was facing me. I could tell she was trying not to be angry. Behind her, blue spirals bounced against each other, around the screen.
"It's okay," she said. "Here."
I stepped closer to her, where she was holding out her arms, but we didn't touch. She knew it wasn't always easy for me to touch people.
"We have to try and help each other," she said. "To be a family. With your sister the way she is right now and everything—"
"Okay," I said.
"We're more than some random people put together in a house."
"I know," I said, feeling awkward, standing there. "It's not your fault."
"What's not my fault?" she said.
"How things are," I said. "With Audra, with me."
Turning, I tried to walk like a fox, silent on the edges of my feet as I went back into the hallway, down the stairs, and through the kitchen.
Downstairs, all the little glass squares of Dad's radio were dark, the red needles still. There's enough light from the windows up by the ceiling, along the driveway. I sat in Dad's rolling swivel chair, the seat patched with tape. Behind me in the darkness, the washer and dryer sat, silent. A pad of paper hung on a hook, but it just had numbers and times listed on it, no real writing. I found another notepad wedged behind a box on the desk, and I took it out and leaned close, squinting to read it—
Iceland is talking about the Number
Stations again. She says the volcano
can block radio waves but that her
transmitter is mobile. She's using the
Earth-Moon-Earth technique, bouncing
her signal off the Moon and down to
me. Imagine her voice, traveling all
that way through outer space and
all that static to reach me. It's so
surprising how people are brought
together, and which ones.
Dad's handwriting is printing, kind of like you learn in school, only smaller, neater. If you looked at his writing from across the room you might think it was lines of numbers.
I took the headset from its hook and fit the padded black foam over my ears. I could hear nothing, only a faint rushing. The dials were here, the switches. I had watched Dad do it so many times that I knew I could turn it all on, line up the numbers. I had talked to people far away before, heard their tiny voices say hello in my ears.
I felt it then, a change in the house. I was nervous, I couldn't hear, and I put the headset back and stood up, and waited.
"Vivian!" Audra shouted. "Are you home? Where are you?"
"Here," I said, already upstairs, halfway into the kitchen.
She was all the way on the second floor, waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
"Were you in my room?" she said.
I didn't say anything.
"I know someone was," she said. "I put a piece of spiderweb on my door, across the top, and it's broken. So I know someone was in there. Mom's home?"
I looked across the hall; the door to our parents' room was closed.
"It was me," I said. "I pushed it open because I missed you."
"Oh," she said. "That's good. That it was you, I mean. Not Mom and Dad again. They're always saying they respect my privacy, but they're into everything, all the time. Here, come in, talk to me while I get ready."
I climbed the stairs and walked by close to her, close enough to smell her sweat, her hair. I sat on her bed.
"Girls?" Mom said, coming down the hallway.
Audra closed the door so we couldn't hear the rest of what she was saying. I could feel Mom, standing there for a moment, then heard her turn and walk back down the hall.
"What are you getting ready for?" I said.
She pulled down the ragged tights she was wearing, kicked them into the closet, and started pulling on her camouflage pants.
"You're not wearing underwear?" I said.
She opened a drawer of her dresser and took something out, held it up. It was white, thin ropes wrapped tightly around themselves.
"I'm going to sleep in the trees," she said. "High up in the branches, in Mount Tabor Park."
"What?" I said.
"It's a hammock," she said. "No one will know where I am."
"Can I come?" I said.
"Not this time." Audra was opening and closing drawers, looking up to check on me. "You know," she said, "you can come in here anytime, look at anything you want."
"Are you running away?" I said.
Audra laughed. "That sounds so stupid, if you say it like that, like a little kid who's rebelling."
"Are you?"
"Rebelling?"
"No," I said. "Running away."
"I'm going somewhere," she said. "That's different."
"Where?" I said.
Audra didn't say anything at first. She just looked around at the walls of her room like she hated them.
"People aren't supposed to live in cities," she said. "It's so claustrophobic. And we live in a suburb, which is even worse—every person in our neighborhood is exactly the same."
"Not exactly," I said.
"Vivian," she said. "You know what I mean."
The back of Audra's hair was clumping together, not quite like dreadlocks, and the bones in her face seemed sharper. She was starting to look kind of like another person, a woman, not like a girl anymore.
"Whose hands are those?" I said.
"Where?"
"On the wall. The bigger ones."
"A friend," she said, and didn't say anything more, turning away, filling up her pockets with things I couldn't see.
"Did he come back?" I said. "The one who disappeared?"
"Yes," she said. "He came back for me."
"Where's he from?" I said.
"Not the city," she said. "A long ways from here. That's where we're going."
"When?" I said. "Just you and him?"
Audra glanced out the window, where the shadowy trees were swaying, then checked the hammock, all folded up in her hand.
"Don't worry," she said to me, and then she went around me, out of the bedroom, down the stairs.
In a moment I heard the front door open, slam shut, and then I saw her walking away, pushing the tire so it swung up, loose on its rope, back and forth behind her as she went down the street.
That was the night when Audra waited until we were all asleep and then she broke the screen of the television in the living room, shattered it so it looked like a spiderweb. She somehow took the computer in my parents' room apart, too, unscrewing the plastic cover and taking pieces out so it would never work again.
She did this all silently, while Mom and Dad were asleep in their bed. That was one reason she'd studied all those ways of walking, to do things like that.
