Another half hour passed. Another few loads of dirt, moved from inside the stakes to the growing pile at the edge of the woods. The sweat was starting to sting my eyes. I didn’t see Mr. Marsh come out of the house. All of a sudden, he was just standing there behind me.
“You’re going to destroy your back,” he said to me. “You won’t last two days like that.”
I stopped and looked at him. He was holding a drink, some kind of summer cocktail with fruit and lots of ice.
“Use your legs,” he said. “Keep your back straight and use your goddamned legs. Then you might last three days.”
I pushed the shovel into the ground, bending with my knees. I hit another big rock.
“You can’t do this by yourself. You know that.”
I wiped off my face, then started working around the rock. This felt like the biggest one yet.
“You’re being a fool,” Mr. Marsh said. He took a long sip from his glass and squinted as he looked up at the sky. “This sun will kill you. Are you listening to me?”
I stopped and looked up at him.
“You give up the others, I’m telling you… I’ll let you sit out here under an umbrella.”
I went back to work on the rock.
“Fine, keep digging,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready to reconsider.”
He walked back into the house, shaking his head. I spent the next twenty minutes hauling out a rock the size of a basketball. Things got a little hazy after that. I remember two birds high above me. I could hear one of the birds screaming at the other. When I looked up, I saw that the screaming bird was chasing a much bigger bird, drawing jagged shapes against the blue sky. The bigger bird could have flown away, or it could have turned on the smaller bird and knocked it out of the game entirely. It didn’t seem to want to do either, maybe as a point of pride. The smaller bird kept after it, screaming those same notes over and over again.
You cannot do that, a voice coming from somewhere inside my overheated head. Never mind the flying. You can’t even make a sound like that. The most elemental thing that any bird or lowly animal can do… it is beyond your abilities.
I started to hit roots, as thick as my arm. I hit them with the sharp edge of the shovel but could not cut them. I stopped and went to refill the water jug. I put my head under the faucet and shocked myself with the electric coldness of the water. I didn’t get up for a while. I sat there until I looked up and saw Mr. Marsh looking at me through the back window. His arms were folded and he had a look on his face that didn’t need any interpretation. I got up and went back to work.
Another hour passed. I didn’t slow down, but there was a strange yellowish tint to everything I was seeing, and the birds above me seemed to turn into vultures. Watching me. Waiting. I kept digging in that one little corner of the rectangle, getting down as deep as I could in that one spot so it would actually look like I was getting somewhere. I knew on some gut level that if I spread out my efforts too much, I’d just end up scraping the top two inches off of everything. And that would make me lose my mind.
The dizziness came next. Every time I bent my head down, I felt like I was going to pass out. I could feel the sun burning right through my shirt. I kept drinking, going back to work, drinking, going back. I didn’t hear her as she came up behind me. I didn’t notice her at all until I turned to reach for the water jug and saw her black sneakers. I looked up, at faded blue jeans with holes in the knees, at a blinding white shirt that gathered around her shoulders and made her look like she belonged on a pirate ship. At her face. Amelia’s face, for the first time in real life. Not a drawing, not a photograph.
Her eyes were dark brown, her hair was light brown. Kind of a mess, like mine, but maybe only half as curly. More like an unruly mop she’d have to push away from her eyes just to get a good look at you. A permanent set to her mouth like she’d just won an argument with you.
I’m making her sound pretty ordinary here. A normal seventeen-year-old, maybe a little un-put-together yet, going through one of those phases, never smiling, never brushing her hair. If you think you have the general picture, then I don’t think I’m doing her justice. Because there was something above and beyond about her, something I could see right away, even as she was standing there at the edge of the hole shading her eyes from the sun.
Of course, I know that seeing her drawings first was a big part of it. I mean, how could it not be? It was just a gut instinct at this point, this feeling that there was definitely something different about her. That maybe she’d seen some of the same things I’d seen.
Crazy, I know. Impossible to know so much about someone from just a few drawings, before you even meet them in person. Now here she was, about to say her first words to me.
“You are so full of shit. Do you know that?”
I kept standing there, looking at her. I can’t imagine what a sight I must have been. Hair even messier than hers, dirt and sweat all over my face. Like some medieval street urchin.
“I already heard about you,” she said. “I mean before you broke into our house. You’re the guy from Milford High School who doesn’t talk, right?”
I didn’t answer. I mean, not with a nod or a shake of the head. I looked at the way the sun made her skin glow.
“Because… why? What’s the deal with that? Because something happened to you when you were a little kid?”
I couldn’t move.
“I can see right through you. Your silent act there. Because believe me… you want to talk about things happening to you when you’re a kid? We could exchange a few stories someday.”
A sound from somewhere, a glass door sliding shut with a bang.
“Or no, maybe not. You’d have to drop the act then, right?”
Her father rushing across the grass now, slipping on the loose straw and nearly falling on his face.
“Nice job on the break-in, too,” she said. “That was real smooth.”
“Amelia!” Her father grabbing her by the arm. “Get away from him!”
“I’m just seeing what he looks like,” she said. “The big bad criminal.”
“Get in the house. Right now.”
“All right, all right! Relax!” She shook her arm free and went back toward the house. She turned and looked back at me for one second. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but I did know one thing. What Mr. Marsh had said about her, about how traumatized she was by just the thought of me breaking into her house? About how terrified she was?
Somehow, I wasn’t getting that from her.
“I warned you,” he said to me. “Did I not warn you?”
Well, yes, I thought. You did warn me.
“If I ever see you…”
Then he ran off the rails. What was he going to say? If I ever see you talking to her? Just standing there like you’re made of stone while she insults you?
“Look, this isn’t going to work,” he said. “Can we just cut through the bullshit right now? You don’t want to come here every day and do this, do you?”
I looked past him. Amelia was standing next to the sliding door. She was watching me. I picked up the shovel and pushed it into the dirt.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it. Looks like you’re making some progress on the shallow end here, eh? Just wait until you get to the deep end.”
He turned to walk away from me. Then he stopped.
“You’ve got one more hour out here,” he said. “I expect sixty minutes. Not fifty-nine. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
I carried the shovelful to the wheelbarrow and threw it in.