On these daily walks, her favorite moment was when the wind, rustling through the tall grasses and Scotch broom, won out over the sound of waves breaking on sand. From there on in, she was on safe ground, with blackberries and salmonberries, flowering thistles and creeping salal. Names came back to her in a rush from her girlhood, when she would escape alone to the wild ravine of Schmitz Park in West Seattle: willowherb, skunk cabbage, stream violet, foam flower, the piggyback plant.
The path led past a small stand of trees that Minna thought of as her forest, in whose damp shade she foraged happily for mushrooms. She never met another soul on these walks. With no one to disturb the riverlike flow of her daydreaming, she effortlessly reentered that past world, before high-school graduation, before Seafirst Bank, before Augie. Squatting, garden knife in hand, among familiar plants, she’d find herself at the prom, or in the passenger seat of Gerry Dexter’s little primrose-yellow Crosley convertible, or hanging out at Zesto’s with the gang, or kissing Dennis Lundke in his big old Packard as they watched Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in High Society at the Valley 6 drive-in. Dennis tasted — not at all unpleasantly — of hot pastrami.
Minna had no real friends on the island. Before the move, friends had been as natural a part of her landscape as brambles and firs. She’d had friends from school, from the bank, from the neighborhood, from Augie’s college. Now it seemed that she’d shed every last one of them, and gained none to take their place. You’d hardly call Sunlight Beach Road a neighborhood, with its empty houses and migrant weekenders, all too young, too engrossed in their own familiness, to take much notice of oldsters like her and Augie. Or perhaps they were put off by Augie’s fame. In her rare encounters with other residents, Boy 381 always came near the top of the agenda, always spoken of as it were somehow strange and forbidding, something that made her and Augie not quite human. Last summer, one of the young weekenders had said, “Of course we’d love to have you over, but we’d hate to disturb his writing.” Minna had said, “Oh, no, he likes to be disturbed,” but no invitation followed.
The nearest person to a friend she had on the island was Svetlana, the henna-haired Russian who drove over from Langley twice a week to help keep the house tidy. But Svetlana’s English was often impossible to understand, she spoke far more than she listened, and she loved to offer Minna her opinions about “Americans.” Americans didn’t look after their old people; Americans spoiled their children; Americans cared only about money…Svetlana had been living in this country for two years, and talked angrily about going back to Russia, where, she said, “they treat me like queen.” Minna, of course, was locked out from the conversations she had with Augie in Russian, though she sounded so much gentler and nicer than she did in her hectic, threatening, arm-waving English. Augie made her laugh, and she’d never once laughed with Minna, so she really was his friend, not hers.
Minna stooped on the path to pick a dozen leaves from a clump of wild chard, just enough for supper that night. She looked forward to having company for the weekend. Students had healthy appetites. For dinner on Friday, she’d make a rocket salad with beet, orange, and walnuts, followed by a rack of Whidbey Island lamb. Blackberries she’d canned in September stood waiting in Mason jars on a high shelf in the utility room, and she could give them a nice cobbler for dessert.
FINN WAS UP to something — Alida was sure of it. She watched him in Humanities, paying no attention to the teacher but secretly scribbling. As he glanced down at his binder, a smirk would steal across his face, quick as a squirrel crossing a street in an undulating ripple of gray. Finn’s writing was notorious. Nobody wanted him on their team for projects because of his regular B minuses and Cs, and peer-critiquing with Finn was murder: he never got what you were trying to say, and his comments always boiled down to “I think it’s stupid.” The only thing Finn could write was code.
“Have you seen Finn?” Alida asked Gail when they headed for lunch.
“Like, the writing stuff? It’s really weird.”
“But what is it?”
“Well,” Gail said, “I think he’s writing mash notes. To me.”
They had to cling to each other for support as they giggled, and Alida had tears of laughter in her eyes when she said, “Oh my God, that’s so egregious!”
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Lucy was seated in the austere ceilingless writers’ room on the ninth floor of the Central Library, skimming through a toppling pile of World War II memoirs. August Vanags looked down at her from the wall that was hung with black-and-white photographs of local authors. His white mustache was trimmed to perfect shape like a piece of fresh-clipped topiary, but the bulgy glare in his eyes made it plain that he’d taken a dislike to the photographer. His military spruceness set him spectacularly apart from the other authors with their unkempt hair, their two-day stubble, their air of having tumbled fully clothed from their beds to face the camera.
To put Boy 381 in context, she’d pulled from the stacks first-person accounts by refugees, soldiers, civilians, Holocaust survivors. None were half as riveting as Augie’s: where he raced, they plodded; where he was light and nimble, they tended to a solemn, leaden weightiness. The more she read of its rivals in the genre, the more certain she became that Boy was a kind of masterpiece. Writing at a sixty-year distance from the war had given Augie an ironic perspective that no one else could match, and the extraordinary speed at which he’d written the book lent to it a dramatic urgency that was missing from these others. There wasn’t a page of Boy on which you couldn’t feel the author driving forward under a full head of steam, and that was part of its mesmeric quality; it infected the reader with what felt like the writer’s own compulsion to find out what was going to happen next.
Less than wholly compelled, she turned the page of Wolfgang Samuel’s German Boy:
We were alone. One wagon, two horses, and five people. The other soldiers had left on their motorcycles once the wagon had been pulled out of the sand. Below us, flames still flickered in some of the village houses. Refugee wagons and several army trucks attempted to enter the burning village. As our wagon crested the ridge, the horses broke into a trot. With no one in front of us to slow our progress, we moved rapidly, and soon saw the last wagon of our reconstituted column ahead of us. We were the last one now, but we were back with our people. What I had thought was a trap had opened and released us. God had answered my prayers and rewarded Mutti’s faith, I thought. The horses pulled steadily. For them, there was no good or bad day; they just did what they were told…
Samuel was pretty good on the whole, but he wasn’t up to Augie’s standard — though this wasn’t the best place in the world to give any book a fair shake. The writers’ room was overlooked from the tenth floor by a metal catwalk serving the glassed-in elevator shafts, and her reading was constantly interrupted by the annoying poing-poing, poing-poing of arriving and departing elevators. Fragments of Spanish conversation drifted down to her, and she found herself half unconsciously trying to translate them. People waiting for elevators on the catwalk leaned on the rail, candidly examining her at her workstation. When she looked up and caught their eyes, they stared straight back, as if they were watching an animal in a zoo: Look, Homo scriberens! “Throw me a banana,” Lucy wanted to call up to them.