Zebra Forest Read online

  Andrew Snow looked over at me, and he seemed almost happy, maybe because I didn’t ignore him. He said, “I like all the parts. The end, of course. Some people say it starts kind of slow, but I never thought so. I always liked that beginning, at the Admiral Benbow.”

  I wasn’t about to tell him I didn’t know what he was talking about. And when I sneaked a glance at Rew, I saw him holding himself as still as a statue. Then he saw me looking at him, and without a word, he went upstairs.

  Sometimes in those early days with Andrew Snow, I’d sit on the couch, trying to imagine the Americans in Iran, wondering what they spent all those hours doing. Did they crouch on the floor in moldy cells, scratching out Morse-code messages to each other? Did they get bread and water through a rusty slot in the wall? Even hostages, I figured, had to have something to keep them busy.

  I tried to interest Rew in the subject, but he only frowned and shook his head. He’d settled into his own kind of routine, spending part of each day staring out his bedroom window at the drive or ticking off the days it would take for someone to come.

  “What about that man who tried to sell us a vacuum that time?” he asked me.

  “He hasn’t been back since Gran said we prosecute trespassers,” I said.

  Rew sighed. “Well, Adele Parks might show up.”

  “If she’s not on vacation yet,” I said, getting uneasy.

  He gritted his teeth. “It doesn’t matter. The police will catch him. Just wait until they see that letter.”

  The thought satisfied him for a full day, but by the end of the first week, he’d taken to parking himself on the stairs and glaring at Andrew Snow, as if he could will the entire Sunshine police force up the road, guns drawn.

  “What’s taking so long?” he asked me the afternoon of the eighth day. “They should be here by now.”

  I could hear the desperation in his voice, and my stomach went liquidy, but I just shrugged, trying to find excuses.

  “Maybe the mail’s slow,” I said. “Or maybe they thought it was a joke and ignored it.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” he said with heat in his voice. “They’ll come.”

  And all the time, that letter sat hidden in my dresser upstairs, where I’d stuffed it after coming home. It made me sick to think of.

  If things had been different, I might have sought out Gran, to see if she was in a talking mood. But Gran came down now only at night, and she never spoke. Sometimes she’d give me a little smile or brush my cheek with her hand when she passed. It was good to feel her there. But she’d never stay if I tried to say anything, and if Andrew Snow started up, she’d put her hands over her ears and rock or just turn and walk upstairs as if she hadn’t heard a thing.

  Of all of us, the one who’d settled into the clearest pattern was Andrew Snow. Besides trying to talk to Gran and sitting quiet in his chair by the door, he’d begun to take an interest in our kitchen. Reading in the paper that only a handful of men had been caught seemed to give him energy, and after that first investigation of our cabinets, he’d turned the whole room into a project. He cleared the old cans and empty jars from the counter, lugging them down to the cellar in a big bag. Then he found the pots we’d buried under old papers and garbage in the broom closet.

  With nothing better to do, I watched him at it. Besides, though he had threatened us and though he held us in the house, I was interested in Andrew Snow. I couldn’t help but be.

  He wasn’t much like Rew really. True, he had the red hair and the light skin. And those big, round eyes so like my brother’s. But he had barely any freckles, and his eyes were brown, like mine.

  After a few days with us, he’d found clothes for himself in a pile Gran had kept in the closet, or maybe in the large paper bags down in our smelly basement. When he came up, clean, in them for the first time, I was startled at how much he looked like a regular man; like anyone.

  Sometimes after that, I’d try to imagine him in one of the stories I’d told Rew. Once or twice I could almost do it, but then Andrew Snow would look my way or Rew would shout at him, and it would disappear. And I would think how I hated Andrew Snow, the angry man.

  Still, after a while, I found a few things I liked about him, even though I didn’t exactly want to. For one, I liked the way he talked.

  When he was done threatening us and just talked of regular things — like what we’d have for supper — Andrew Snow’s voice had a steadiness to it. It didn’t sound like a voice that kept secrets. So I wasn’t so surprised when on day eight, Andrew Snow told a story. It was about my mother.

  “You look like her” was how he began it. He’d been watching me flip through one of our old magazines, plenty of which could be found under our couch. I was peering at pictures of Fairfield County, where, according to Life, smart New Yorkers had their summer homes.

  I looked up, startled. “Like who?” I asked.

  “Like your mother,” he said. “Just like her. I should have realized it when I saw you first, but I never knew her that young.”

  This statement fascinated me, and I put aside the certain knowledge that Rew would brand me a traitor for engaging in communication with the enemy.

  “I do?” I said. “Wasn’t she pretty?”

  He gave me a strange look. “She was,” he said. “Very pretty. That’s the first thing everyone said about her.”

  All of a sudden, my head started buzzing again. I tried, but failed, to fix on the image of a pretty woman with brown hair like mine. Despite my better judgment, and knowing as I said it that I was breaking Gran’s rules, I asked:

  “What was her name?”

  It was his turn to look startled.

  “You don’t know her name?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “It was Amanda,” he said. “Amanda White. We used to joke about the fact that she switched her name from White to Snow.”

  I sat very still, letting this news settle. My mother’s name was Amanda. She was pretty. She laughed at jokes.

  From nowhere, a hot wave of anger washed through me. “She didn’t,” I said.

  Andrew Snow looked puzzled. “Didn’t what?” he asked me.

  And I was confused again. Didn’t women who laughed at jokes leave their babies? Is that what I thought? I knew they did. They probably laughed lots of times. But it wasn’t a nice-sounding laugh, like he made it seem. It was an ugly laugh. Too loud. Unmannerly, as Gran would say.

  Andrew Snow was watching me. I glared at him. “She left us, you know. She said we were all your idea.”

  Something changed in Andrew Snow’s face then. His lips pressed together and made a hard little line, and he blinked his eyes fast, those round eyes that were too like Rew’s.

  “She was high-spirited,” he said. “Funny and smart, but young. Too young, maybe, to have responsibilities. It’s true, I was the one who wanted kids.” He seemed about to say something else but stopped there. I looked at him, waiting. Angry as I was, I wanted to hear more about Amanda White, who was young and funny and didn’t want me.

  But Andrew Snow stopped talking then. Stories about my family always seem to be short. I looked down into my lap and noticed I was crushing the picture of one of those pretty summer homes in Fairfield County.

  Andrew Snow started in on Gran again that night. He marched upstairs, rattled her doorknob, and started talking.

  “You can’t stay in there forever,” he said. “You’re going to have to answer me sometime.”

  I came up behind him. “You don’t know Gran,” I said. “She’ll stay in there for as long as she wants. Just leave her alone. Can’t you?”

  He looked at me, a sorry kind of a look, but then he rapped sharply on Gran’s door. “Just tell me the reason,” he said. “I just need to know the reason. Didn’t you think I’d ever come home? Is that it?”

  Rew had been in his room across the hall with his door closed. He came out when he heard Andrew Snow.

  “You’ve made her crazy,” he said in a
strange, frozen voice. “She hates you. She wasn’t ever this bad before.”

  Andrew Snow said nothing. But later, he found me in the kitchen, where I was trying to wipe off a sticky part of the counter so I could make myself a sandwich with the last of the bread and some chunky peanut butter.

  “We’re going to need another supply run soon,” he said, looking into the cabinets. It made me queasy to think of, with that letter waiting upstairs. But I didn’t say anything.

  For a minute, I thought he was wondering why I didn’t, but then he bit his lip and asked me a question I didn’t expect.

  “Your gran,” he said. “What’s she like? Usually?”

  I liked the word he used, so I said, “She’s better than this, usually.”

  He seemed to think he needed to explain something to me as he looked round the kitchen. “I didn’t know this was how you lived,” he said. “I knew you were with her, but — I didn’t know she’d gotten this way after my dad died.”

  It took me aback to think of him having a dad. And, for that matter, of Gran having a husband. She never spoke of him, but then, most of her stories about herself stopped when she was ten years old, and other than that, she talked about no one but the people in Life magazine, and me and Rew.

  “She’s not this bad always,” I said again, feeling the need to defend her. “Lots of times — mostly — Gran is just a little bit funny. But she cooks for us and stuff, and we’re not hungry.”

  Usually, I said to myself. Besides, when she went into her bad times, I was big enough to shop and cook.

  But Andrew Snow was looking round the kitchen again. “In prison,” he said — so matter-of-factly he might have said “at work” or “at the grocery store”—“I work in the kitchen.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I mean that’s my job,” he said. And he sounded almost like he might laugh. “Over there. You didn’t think we sat around in tiny cells all day, did you?”

  Actually, that’s exactly what I had thought, but I decided not to say it. I just looked at him. I was thinking that I’d always wondered what job he had. And all the time I’d imagined him flying planes or making secret treaties, he was just past the Zebra Forest, working in the kitchen.

  It made me wonder for a second if my mother, Amanda White, was out somewhere walking around this very minute. Maybe in a store, shopping, or at the movies, carrying that brown purse of hers. The thought made me grit my teeth.

  “It’s a good thing to keep kitchens clean and in order,” Andrew Snow was saying. “I learned that. It makes things easier. And you don’t get sick as often.”

  “We don’t get sick,” I protested.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said.

  Andrew Snow was full of surprises. When he wasn’t threatening us, he was worried we might get sick eating off dirty plates.

  “You could always clean it, if you care that much,” I said.

  And Andrew Snow surprised me again. “I guess I will,” he said. And he found a towel and got started.

  If I had been Rew, the minute our father turned his back to scrub the sink, maybe I’d have knocked him on the head with the nearest frying pan. But there was something nice about watching him work there, as if he planned to make us a meal and worried that we ate in an unhygienic environment, like Adele Parks did. And actually, once Rew did wake up, into the second hour of that four-hour cleanup, he didn’t run anywhere. He just stood in the kitchen doorway next to me, watching. Andrew Snow noticed him, too, but he didn’t say anything. He just kept on working.

  After that, I found that Andrew Snow knew quite a lot about hygiene. This is possibly something they teach you in prison. I don’t know. But he certainly spent a lot of time improving the hygiene of that kitchen.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t gotten sick before now,” he said when he found a stack of dirty dishes festering under the kitchen sink. “You’re growing enough mold here to make penicillin.”

  Since I had never heard him make a joke, I started to defend Gran, but he stopped me.

  “She was always a great cook, you know,” he said. “When I was a kid, she made a lot of pancakes. Every morning almost.”

  This was one thing I had figured out myself.

  “She makes them for us sometimes,” I said.

  “My father liked pancakes,” he said. “He could eat stacks of them in the morning. He said farmers have always known breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and they’d eat pancakes even before dawn.”

  “Was he a farmer?” I asked.

  Andrew Snow did laugh then. It was a strange, happy sound. A minute after he did it, I couldn’t figure out how that laugh had come out of his face. But then, I’d seen Rew laugh a billion times, before Andrew Snow came. It was kind of like that.

  “No,” Andrew Snow said. “He lived all his life in the city. But he loved the country. The woods, especially. He had all these nature books, and he’d read them at night, learning about trees and wildlife and such. He said that one day he’d retire out here, probably to a place just like this one. He never did, though.”

  “Why not?”

  Andrew Snow didn’t answer for a little bit. He stared out the kitchen window at the Zebra Forest. “He got sick,” he said finally. “He didn’t have time.”

  I looked out at it, too. Until Andrew Snow came, I hadn’t been away from the Zebra for this long ever, not even in the coldest winter. I tried to imagine my grandfather, always wanting to come out to the country and never getting to.

  “I don’t remember him,” I said after a while. “He died when I was little.”

  Andrew Snow nodded. “That must have been when she moved out here,” he said.

  “Gran, you mean?”

  He nodded again. “She wrote me. She said she couldn’t stay in that old apartment of theirs without him. Especially not with me — away. But she didn’t say where she would go.”

  I couldn’t think what to say to that. But Andrew Snow didn’t need me to say anything. He just stared out at the Zebra, quiet. At last he said, “They loved each other with a passion, those two.”

  I stood there looking out at the Zebra, too, wondering where Gran, who kept every magazine she’d ever subscribed to, had put all the pictures of her husband, my grandfather, the man she’d loved with a passion.

  The next morning, I went on another supply run. This time, I didn’t mind the bus ride, didn’t worry that people would know. But when I passed the blue mailbox, I felt that familiar drop in my stomach.

  Before I’d gone downstairs, I’d taken the letter and stuffed it back in my pocket. I knew by now I was never putting it in the mail. But I couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with it. Then I noticed a garbage can, one of those public ones that sit on the edge of playgrounds. There was a little park near the bus stop, and I could put the letter in there just as easily as I could put it in the mailbox.

  I crossed the street to get to it and stood over it for a minute. When the sidewalk emptied, I pulled out Rew’s envelope and looked at it again. It had gotten crumpled from sitting in my dresser and pocket so long. But the red EMERGENCY still stood out bold as anything.

  I dropped it in the garbage can, my heart pounding, and turned to go. Then I thought what would happen if the garbage man saw it and opened it. No. That wouldn’t work. So I went back and plucked it out.

  My hands were sweating, and they left smudges on the envelope. I couldn’t keep carrying it around. What if it dropped out of my pocket? What if Rew found it? A man passed me on the street, and I shoved the letter back into my pocket, then took it out again. Rew had written that EMERGENCY big enough that someone could see it from across the street, I thought. I tore open the envelope.

  Then I started ripping. I just tore it all — the envelope and the letter — into tiny pieces. No one could read it when I’d finished with it. And I let the pieces fall, like snow, into the garbage can.

  All the time I was doing it, I could see Rew,
sitting there writing that letter on his bed. See him happy. And my chest ached, and my eyes smarted. My hands were even shaking. But I couldn’t send that letter. I knew I never could.

  It took me a long time to pull myself together after that. I went and sat on one of the swings in the little playground, sat there holding tight to the chain, letting my feet push me back and forth gently, till my heart stopped rattling my ribs so hard. And all the time I kept thinking that if Rew knew what I’d done, he would never, ever forgive me.

  When I made the bell ding at the Sunshine Grocery I found Molly back at her TV watching, and it was a relief to find something that felt normal.

  Andrew Snow’s list this time included not just vegetables but a bunch of cleaning supplies, some of which I’d never heard of. He’d made me take a knapsack, even, so I wouldn’t have to carry it all in my hands. That’s how much he wanted me to buy. I knew Molly would notice and thought about what I might say to distract her when I got to the counter.

  But Molly, cracking her gum with a vengeance, wasn’t one to let things go.

  “Looks like someone’s making a project of it” is what she said when I set a bottle of bleach, scouring pads, and Windex on the counter. Plus a bottle of vinegar, which Andrew Snow said is a great natural cleaner. “It’s a little late for spring cleaning, don’t you think?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was joking, so I tried to think of a reason for her. “Well, we’ve got time now, in the summer,” I said. “I guess that’s why.”

  Molly sighed. She pushed her hair back off her face and then shook it out behind her. “Lots of people having time on their hands in this town,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard, but there was a major layoff at Enderfield. A bunch of guys are out of work.”

  I didn’t know what she wanted me to say to that, so I asked, “Did they catch the people? The ones that ran away?”