Zebra Forest Read online

  I shook my head. “No, but —” But there was no but, and so I reluctantly took the letter.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” And I slipped it into my pocket.

  “Promise?” he asked again.

  I didn’t want to promise, but there was nothing else to say.

  “Yeah,” I said at last. “I promise.”

  After my promise, Rew’s appetite returned. He ate the sandwich I had brought him and drank the juice. Then he pulled Treasure Island back into his lap and rubbed his hand over the old pages.

  “They don’t get him in the end because he’s too smart,” he said, grinning suddenly, and I knew he meant Long John Silver. “No one can keep hold of him.”

  He was back to our old argument about whether the double-crossing pirate was the best or worst person in the story.

  We both liked Jim, because after all, he was good. “And he keeps the treasure” was how I’d always argue it. But that was where our agreement ended.

  From there, I’d take up for my particular favorite — Dr. Livesey — who helps Jim right from the start. The doctor isn’t afraid of anybody, ever. I had a list of the doctor’s strengths, which I’d tick off for Rew when he told me that Dr. Livesey was okay but boring.

  For one, the doctor never yelled at anyone, like that old squire or the captain. He only fought when he had to, and he stuck it out the whole trip, never ran off, and even took care of the pirates some.

  It was a secret of mine that even though we agreed on liking Jim, it practically killed me that our hero ran off out of the stockade, leaving all his friends and never telling Dr. Livesey a thing about it. When we talked about it, Rew said that was okay, because didn’t Jim get the ship for them afterward? Didn’t it end up saving them? I knew it did, but somehow, it just didn’t seem right. And then, I’d always argue, it was the doctor who saved Jim and old Long John in the end. “Long John Silver himself said it,” I would tell him, quoting the pirate in the raspy voice I imagined would have been the sound of Long John Silver: “‘Thank ye kindly, doctor. . . . You came in in about the nick, I guess, for me and Hawkins.’”

  “Sure,” Rew would say. “But he had to say that. If you want to look at it that way, then it was Ben Gunn who saved them, really.” We both always laughed at that, because Ben Gunn, the crazy man who’d been marooned on the island, wasn’t anybody’s favorite.

  We’d spend at least an hour a week on this topic in the Zebra, and it was a kind of joke we had, going back over it, deciding whether we were happy or not that Long John Silver got his one measly bag of coins and escaped at the end.

  It seemed to me that after writing his letter, Rew felt we were almost as good as free. Maybe that’s why he’d started our game up again. So I said what I always said when we talked about Long John Silver: “Well, he only got that one bag of coins, anyway. And only ’cause Ben Gunn let him. He couldn’t have lived long on that.”

  Rew lay back on his bed and glanced out the window. It was getting dark now, the sky going purple over the Zebra. I guess he realized then that even if Andrew Snow did send me out and I mailed his letter, we wouldn’t be free for a while. Rew’s realistic that way. He frowned, lying there, and pulled his book up near his face, breathing in the smell of it. It was an old book, and beat up, but it had the good, sweet aroma of old paper. Books have that, I’ve noticed. If they don’t get moldy, they’re nice. We had our share of moldy books down in the cellar. But Treasure Island still had that nice old library smell to it. He kept his face in there so long, I got nervous he might cry again. But he didn’t. After a while, he closed the book and rested his head on it, looking tired.

  “If there were a tree outside my window, we wouldn’t need to send the letter,” he said quietly. “I’d just climb down it and run to the police, and he’d never even know it. I’d do it in the night.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said. “You’d never find the way in the dark, so far from town. You’d get hit by a car or something first.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “I could do it. I’d do it in the day, even, if I didn’t think he’d hurt you and Gran.”

  In a funny way, I felt happy all of a sudden, hearing him include Gran. Rew could get really mad, but he never stayed angry at me or Gran too long.

  I looked down at the faded pattern of his quilt, a mishmash of cowboys and spaceships and any boy thing Gran could find. She’d made it for him when he was just born, she told him once, as a birthday gift. According to Gran, I’d had one, too, once upon a time, with princesses and ribbons on it. But in a fit of temper when I was two, my mother had thrown it in the trash.

  “You think he’d do that?” I asked him. “Hurt us? Really?”

  “He’s mean enough to,” Rew said. “Didn’t you think so when he pulled us down the stairs that way? He’s crazy, Annie. He’s bad.”

  I thought about it. Andrew Snow was strong — that was certain. He’d held me and Rew each with just the one hand. And when those policemen had come, he hadn’t hesitated a second. But then, he hadn’t exactly hurt us, either. And he’d thanked me for making him a sandwich. Did bad people say thank you? I thought of the letter then, sitting in my pocket. I wished I didn’t have it.

  “He killed someone,” Rew said, reading my thoughts.

  Rew knew things, better than me usually. But it was hard to picture the man who had put his head in his hands doing something like that. In my mind, I tried to make a story about it so I could understand it better. But the story wouldn’t come.

  I sat with Rew until he fell asleep and then made my way downstairs. Andrew Snow was sitting in the chair by the door, looking out at the night. From that window, you could just see the edge of the Zebra.

  I’d been outside in the dark lots of times, and I loved the Zebra in moonlight. We never went far into it at night, but sometimes in winter, Rew and I went out all bundled up and just sat at the edge there, watching the clean, star-pricked sky rise up over all those trees. I thought about Andrew Snow wandering through it in the dark. I didn’t think he would have noticed the sky.

  He looked a little surprised to see me standing there so long, just looking. Maybe he thought I wanted him to say something. So he did.

  “You’re eleven, aren’t you?” he said to me.

  I nodded.

  “I remember you as a tiny thing,” he said. “Last time I saw you, you were just three. But you talked then. Did your Gran ever tell you?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t tell about those times,” I said. “She doesn’t like to remember them.”

  He stared at me then, as if he expected me to say something more. But I didn’t.

  “I thought maybe you’d have asked her,” he said at last. “You might have wanted to know.”

  Sometimes lying is so easy, you do it before you even think.

  “No,” I said. “I never did.”

  Being a hostage wasn’t anything like I imagined it would be, having heard about it from the news on ABC. I had never imagined hostages eating, for example. I’d never wondered how they slept at night.

  But all those things occurred to me on day two of our captivity. They came up because Andrew Snow went into our kitchen.

  Overnight he had found an even better way to chain the front door shut, so we couldn’t get outside. That left him free to explore a little, and the first thing he did was look in our cabinets.

  There wasn’t much inside. After our dinner party the night before he came, there were few groceries left, considering we usually weren’t too well stocked anyway. He poked around, then asked me what we usually ate.

  I shrugged, mindful of Rew, seething in the front room, listening to me converse with the enemy.

  “I mean when your Gran cooks for you,” he prompted.

  I tried to come up with an answer that wouldn’t hurt Gran or enrage Rew.

  “She doesn’t cook that much,” I said carefully. “But we get by.”

  Andrew Snow looked at me. “Who does the shoppi
ng?” he asked.

  It took a minute for me to answer him, I was so struck by how Rew had known he’d be asking that. My brother was too smart for himself, I thought. In a way, it scared me. Andrew Snow was waiting for an answer, though, so I said, “Sometimes Gran, sometimes me.”

  “You?”

  “I can do it,” I said, indignant. “If she gives me a list, and money.”

  “Well,” he said, looking again at the nearly empty cupboard, “I can give you a list. But what about money? Is there some in the house here?”

  “Just a little,” I said, careful, in case he meant to trick me. “Just enough for food and stuff.”

  Andrew Snow tilted his head and sighed. It startled me, because Rew does that, too, sometimes, when he gets tired. “I’m not going to take it,” he said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. But we will need to eat.”

  He left me then and went through the front room and up the stairs. I didn’t understand what he meant to do until it was too late, when I heard him knocking on Gran’s door.

  I dashed after him then.

  “Leave her be!” I said, and Rew, who had followed me up, pushed him from behind. But Andrew Snow paid no attention.

  “Mom,” he said. The word was so strange, it stopped us both for a moment. Of course, he must have called her that once.

  “Open up. I want to talk to you.”

  I could hear the bed creak on the other side of the door. Gran didn’t answer.

  Andrew Snow looked over his shoulder at us. “Go downstairs,” he said. “I only want to talk to her.”

  Neither of us moved. He put his hand on the doorknob. The door opened easily. Gran never locked it. She didn’t have to. We knew when to leave her be.

  Gran was lying in her bed, her back to us, her face to the wall. I knew she was awake. When she heard the door open, she shook her head ever so slightly.

  Andrew Snow stiffened. “I need to talk to you,” he said again, louder this time.

  When Gran didn’t move, he said, “You can’t turn your back forever, Mom. Not anymore. I’ll get an answer. You owe me that. And this time, it will be more than twenty words.”

  Gran shook her head again, and one hand came up over her ear.

  “Leave her be,” I whispered to Andrew Snow. “Please just let her alone.”

  Andrew Snow didn’t answer me, but he stood there, his hand so white on the doorknob that I took a step back, sure he was going to slam it. But he only held it there for another minute. Then he shook his head, sighed, and closed the door.

  The next day, after checking that all the doors and windows were secured, Andrew Snow left us downstairs alone while he took a shower. The minute he heard the water run, Rew, who’d been slumping on the stairs, unraveling part of the old carpet that padded the steps, took off for the kitchen. I followed him and found him yanking open drawers, rifling through them, and then slamming them shut.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked him. “You saw him take the key.”

  Scraps of paper, pens, and the occasional bottle cap went flying as he dug around.

  “Something,” he said. “Anything. He thinks we’re helpless. We can’t do anything. Well, he doesn’t know us.”

  I didn’t see what pawing through the kitchen drawers was going to get us. I started to tell him the project was hopeless, but he ignored me. Finally, he let out a happy little cry and pulled out the one sharp thing in the kitchen, a long paring knife we used to cut vegetables, when we had them.

  “Rew,” I said.

  He grinned and ran over to the kitchen door, jabbing the knife tip into the lock. He jiggled it, shoved it in deeper, and twisted it again. He grimaced with the effort of it, closing his eyes as he worked the knife into the lock. Nothing clicked. He pulled it out to find the knife tip bent at a new angle.

  “Stupid knife,” he said, pressing it on the counter and trying to force it back into shape. He grunted with the effort.

  I’d pulled out a kitchen chair to watch him work, but now I got up to see if I could help. A sound from the living room made us turn.

  Andrew Snow, hair dripping, was standing in the kitchen doorway. His eyes darted to the knife in Rew’s hand, and he lunged across the room so fast neither of us had time to react. His fingers clamped round Rew’s wrist, and he shook it once, hard. The knife clattered to the floor.

  Andrew Snow bent swiftly and pocketed it. When he looked up again, his face was as blotchy as Rew’s. He advanced on my brother, and I pushed my way in between them, just in case. Through his wet, smelly shirt, I could see his chest heaving, but when he spoke, it was almost a whisper.

  “You know what it is to cut someone? You know what that’s like?” he asked. His eyes were so wide open, I had to look away. “You want to see someone’s blood come?”

  Behind me I could hear Rew breathing heavy.

  “You think about that,” Andrew Snow said. “You think if that’s something you want to see now.”

  I wanted to run, but I turned to see Rew staring straight ahead, quaking with outrage. He looked like he’d swallowed something rotten, and he pulled away from us both, pushing past Andrew Snow and stomping toward the living room.

  At the door, he turned, face blazing.

  “You think I’d be like you?” Rew spat. “Is that what you think? I’d rather die than be like you.”

  Then he spun around and ran upstairs.

  I stood, my back pressed against the counter, Andrew Snow still too close to me, half turned as he watched Rew go. He stood rigid, unmoving except for his hands, which were balled into fists so tight they shook.

  “He was only trying to pick the lock,” I said quietly. “He wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  Andrew Snow didn’t look at me. He stood like that, too still, until I’d slipped past him and fled the kitchen.

  On the fifth day of our captivity, a Monday, Rew’s prediction came true. Andrew Snow sent me on a supply run.

  He’d been careful with the list. Unlike Gran’s lists, which consisted of anything she felt like that day, sometimes strange things, like peaches and avocados, sometimes chocolate or condensed milk, Andrew Snow’s list was methodical. It had all the food groups, including vegetables. Plus, he wanted a newspaper.

  I dug the money out of one of Gran’s hiding places — a fake book that was really a box she kept in the bookcase. One of the jobs I’d gotten in the last year was doing Gran’s banking, which meant going to town and taking out the money we needed for the month. At the bank, Gran kept all the money the insurance company had given her after Grandpa Snow died, and to get some of it, I’d bring her withdrawal slip all filled out, and then go round the house with the fresh bills, filling up her several hiding places. The fake book was my favorite, and so I put twenties in there, because I used twenties at the grocery. I didn’t know how that book was meant to fool anyone, since it was unlike any other we had. Our house was a paperback house, and filled with magazines. The fake book looked like it had been made of leather and had gold lettering on it, even though it was nothing more than painted cardboard. Rew always said it was stupid to put money in a book with gold lettering, but I didn’t think crooks were smart enough to think of that, so I kept right on doing it. This time, though, with Andrew Snow in the house, I did regret it. Still, I tried to take the cash out while he was in the bathroom. It didn’t work. He came out just as I was slipping the book back into the shelf.

  “I know about it already,” he said when he saw me shove it back quick, trying to pretend it was nothing. “She’s always had it. Drove my father crazy, but she used to say that if ever there was a hurricane, or a war or something, one should have cash on hand.” I felt stupid then, and something else, too. I guess it was knowing then that no matter how much I wished he weren’t, this was the real Andrew Snow. Maybe up till then I thought Gran might have made a mistake. Maybe this red-haired man wasn’t our father. But he was. I knew it because Gran had said that same thing to us, about hurricanes and wars. She’d
said it a million times.

  All of a sudden, I could have cried. My throat hurt and my eyes got hot, and if it had been any other day, I would have sat down on the couch and just done it. But Andrew Snow would have seen me, so I bit my lip instead, folded the money, put it into my pocket, and walked to the door.

  “Do you want me to go or not?” I asked him.

  Just then Rew came running down the stairs. He stopped short at the bottom.

  Andrew Snow looked at him. “You’re not going,” he said, and his voice had that edge to it again. “Just your sister.”

  “I know that,” Rew said, sounding mad. But when Andrew Snow turned back to me, Rew gave me a nod and patted his pocket, raising his eyebrows to make sure I had the letter with me. I didn’t do anything in response; Andrew Snow was looking right at me, after all.

  Andrew Snow walked over and fiddled with the chains he’d rigged up. But just as he got ready to open the door, he gave me a sharp last look.

  “Before you think of saying anything, remember I have them right here with me,” he said.

  I looked past him at Rew, who gave me an encouraging smile.

  I didn’t need to be reminded.

  Outside, I could smell the Zebra. Even if for some reason I stopped feeling cold or hot or rain or sun, I bet I could close my eyes and still tell which season I was in just by the smell of the trees and dirt there. Spring was sweet mud and flowers. Fall had a kind of moldy edge to it, and winter was all dust and bark. As for summer, the Zebra carried a mossy, thick aroma full of baking leaves and oozing sap, which I guess was its growing smell.

  If Andrew Snow hadn’t been watching me from the window, I’d have veered off and run straight for it, just to breathe it in for a while. But he was, so I forced myself to turn my back and walk the quarter mile out to the bus. I waited on the main road, baking in the heat, until it came. I didn’t mind taking the bus alone, and I didn’t mind the shopping, but that morning, on my own for the first time in five days, I felt sick at the thought of seeing other people. It felt as if the skin on my head had shrunk and now stretched tight across my skull, trying to squeeze my brains.