Beatrice said, “He’s not very smart.”
“How do you know?”
“His job is mowing lawns,” she said. “He didn’t know what lozenges were. He believed it when I said I played guitar.”
Calvin’s eyes stood still.
“You believed he mows lawns.”
She twitched.
Then she covered her ears and squeezed her lids shut. “Stop staring at me,” she hissed. “Stop talking to me.”
“Sorry,” Calvin said, patting her arm. “Sorry.”
Soft, tiny blows fell on her arms and her shoulders.
“Turn off all the lights,” she told him. “Turn up the radio.”
In the darkness, she opened her eyes. The radio was glowing. And Shred was still talking, announcing songs, disparaging requests, saying, “This one goes out to…”
“Maglite,” Calvin whispered.
It was the most bludgeonlike thing either of them owned. The kind of flashlight that police officers and night watchmen used, the kind that required six enormous batteries, sliding down its cylinder with the cool weight of cannonballs. The Maglite lived inside Calvin’s room, a universe she was no longer so familiar with. She bumped into the umbrella stand that held his historic swords.
“Where are you, Calvin?”
He was crouching underneath the window. She reached out and touched his arm, and felt how he was cradling the flashlight. She acted like a blind person and touched him all over. He was still a citizen in that other country to which she had once belonged: all of a piece, flawless and moist, his chest lightly heaving like a hare’s. From the other room the telephone rang once, and stopped.
“Oh god,” Beatrice said. “Do you think they answered it?”
“I really hope not,” her brother said, and from all around her, she felt the faintest draft seep in, as faint as someone blowing out a candle.
She thought of warning them. But here, on the very top floor of her house, there were no buttons embedded in the walls. Those buttons existed downstairs, in the rooms with the long windows, where her mother and her father lived. From here it was impossible to give warning, to say important things, to speak of danger; it was possible only to be summoned.
They would pick up the phone. They would answer the door.
“Oh god,” she said.
Outside, something stirred. Something rustled through the trees and then stepped out onto the snow.
“Raccoon,” Calvin whispered.
But it didn’t sound like a raccoon, or a wild and mangy cat. It didn’t sound like a hawk alighting on the lawn. She had once believed that she lived among the fir trees and the night-roaming animals, but now she remembered the street that wrapped around one side of their house, the scream of tires as they hit the hairpin curve; she remembered the gas station at the top of the hill, and the telephone booth beneath its buzzing lights. Beside her, her brother softly heaved. She could hear the crunch of footfalls on the snow.
Then Calvin shot up. He was too fast. He threw open the window, and the cold air came tumbling in on them.
“Stop! Don’t move!” he cried.
“No!” Beatrice said, pulling on his leg. “Get down!”
“Kids?” a voice asked from below.
Beatrice stood up in surprise. Pressed against her brother, she peered out into the darkness. Calvin pushed the Maglite’s tender black button, and a beam of light fell into the yard.
A man looked back up at them. He was protecting his eyes with one hand. In the other he held a bright blue duffel bag. He wore a long dress coat, pinned to the lapel of which was the unwieldy fir tree that Beatrice had made in her ceramics class a year before. She could see it even from here.
“Papa?” she said.
“What are you kids doing up?” their father asked, trying to sound mad and quiet at the same time.
“We heard something,” Beatrice whispered back.
“What are you doing up?” Calvin wanted to know.
This question seemed to puzzle him. He dropped his hand to his side and lifted his duffel bag. “I was getting this from the car.”
Calvin kept the beam of light trained on their father. “It’s late!” Calvin said.
The light fell in a circle around him. Beyond that, Beatrice could make out the shape of trees rising up, and the untidy bushes, and the lopsided skeleton of the gazebo that he had begun building in the fall, but didn’t have time to finish. She thought she spied something rotund in the darkness, loping toward the trash cans. She saw the marks her father’s feet had left in the snow and the sharp shadow that his body threw onto the lawn. It was only her father. But something inside of her still clenched. It was only her father creeping about in the dark, and now he was standing there, holding his duffel bag, wearing her fir tree, his footsteps heading in one direction.
Tonight, she knew, he would go back inside. He would raise his voice, move furniture across the floor, and in the morning, around the table, the four of them would look into each other’s tired faces. But one night, another night — soon, she thought — there would be an apartment.
And suddenly it was no longer her word, her idea.
“Calvin,” she said. “Turn it off.”
Without the flashlight, her brother wouldn’t be able to see. She wrapped her hands around the cold cylinder and pulled.
But he did not let go. “No.” He said fiercely, “It’s late.”
From behind her came the sound of the radio, speaking into the emptiness of her bedroom. The voice said, “This kid who keeps calling me, he wants to hear the Clash. Now normally, I would never play the Clash. Yes, I know, we wouldn’t have punk rock without them, but I mean, you can hear the Clash on other radio stations. You can hear the Clash on oldies stations. We just don’t play the Clash here on the Rock Hotel,” Shred explained. “But this kid who called, he got me thinking about when I was his age, when I heard the Clash for the first time. I had never heard anything like them. London Calling—that record changed me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that record. So I’m going to play that song, for that kid who called. What can I say? It’s a song of my youth.”
Crossing
MR. MEACHAM, THE DEPARTMENT chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.
“I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.
“You don’t teach English,” Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”
It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide café windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.
“What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.
“Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.
“Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”
He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. “Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids, when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!
“All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to normal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history left by the time they’re through. Just social studies” And Mr. Meacham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.