I look around Alex’s room for something I could use to defend myself. I pick up one of the clubs, though it wouldn’t bemuch defense against an intruder. And at this point I might actually welcome an intruder. Another living, breathing human being.
I hear the sound a third time.
A creak, a pop.
I recognize it now.
It’s only the floorboards, expanding in the heat.
22.
once
When I was eight, the toilet in the bathroom next to my bedroom started making a weird whiny sound at night.
It was the most lonesome sound in the world.
Like a sad, aching, cosmic wail. Not made by anything alive. It sounded like it was made by something older than alive.
It made me think of stars and how big the universe was.
It made me think of how small I was.
In my mind, I called it the cold lonely sound.
“What happens when we die?” I asked my mom one night when she came to tuck me in.
She sat down on the bed. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you what some people believe? Or do you want me to tell you what I think is the truth?”
“The truth,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “We’re very, very lucky to be born at all. Do you know how strange and beautiful it is to be living?”
I did. I felt that. I had always felt that.
“The odds against all the ancestors over all the years meeting up and having the children they did, and the odds against the exact cells coming together to make you...”
“I know,” I said. That part was awesome and scared me, too.
“Right,” she said. “You’re asking about dying. Not being born.”
I waited. I had a stuffed fox that had once been hers, from a movie when she was small. I was holding on to it tight.
“I think we’re part of nature,” my mom said gently. “We’re born, and we live, and then we die. And our bodies return to the earth. Things grow from it again. So we’re always a part of the universe.”
She kissed my forehead.
I held on tight to that fox, even though it was not alive, even though it had never been alive, and I did not sleep.
23.
now
“You didn’t stay drowned,” I tell my journal. I threw it in the lake at the end of last summer. “Butthisshould do the trick.”
I light it on fire in my driveway with the matches my mom keeps next to the stove.
I let it lick, lick, lick.
