Dark Water - Laura McNeal [12]
I guess there’s not an easy way to mime “You are of two worlds,” which is what Gallo said after he compared me to a cat. In the beginning, what I would do is memorize the sound of a Spanish phrase, and then I’d get someone at school to translate. Later, I learned words and grammar.
Amiel studied me for a second, and then he finished his coffee. He didn’t say anything to me that day. It was a while after that, at the river, when Amiel said it over and over again to me slowly, in his damaged voice that is like a whisper: Tú eres de dos mundos, tú eres de dos mundos, tú eres de dos mundos.
Ten
I woke up at 1:15 a.m. to see my mother watching the silkworms. I slept in the living room on a foldout couch, and she used the single bedroom that I guess was old Lavar’s. Usually if I woke up in the middle of the night, she was in her bed with the light on, reading nonfiction paperbacks about women who start their lives over in canny new business ventures instead of the novels she used to like. But that night she was sitting on a kitchen chair by the tray of worms, wearing the peach chenille robe my father and I gave her on Mother’s Day so many years ago that the sleeve is ripped at the armhole and the cuffs are dingy.
She looked over her cup of hot Postum at me. Postum is what the label calls a “grain beverage,” and she wanted me to drink that instead of coffee. Postum’s not bad in hot milk if you add enough sugar, but I had trouble staying awake, while she had trouble staying asleep. We needed different cures, it seemed to me.
“What are the worms doing?” I asked.
“Eating,” she said.
“Weren’t they doing that all day?”
“Yes.” She sipped her Postum and leaned forward to point at one of the white creatures. He held his head up and swayed as if he were hearing a wonderful holy voice. “That’s called the praying position,” she said. “He’s waiting to shed his skin and move to the last instar. If you disturb them while they’re doing this, they can get stuck or die.”
“I thought he was begging for more salad,” I said, pretty concerned, suddenly, that I might have disturbed a few praying caterpillars while showing the collection to Greenie or adding mulberry leaves. The white caterpillar waved his strange noggin in the air and swayed like someone who was closing his eyes to shut out the material world.
“What did you and Robby do today?” she asked, her eyes on the mesmerizing caterpillar, not on me.
Discussed Uncle Hoyt’s adultery, I almost said because I have a powerful impulse at all times to spill the beans. It’s like I’m always under the influence of scopolamine, which, if you haven’t watched The Guns of Navarone as many times as Robby and I, is the drug the Nazis give the Allied prisoner to make him reveal when the American ships are going to attack. I knew that if my mom kept quizzing me, if she had any inkling of what was going on, I’d end up saying that Hoyt was turning out just like Dad.
“Homework,” I finally said.
“Is that all?”
“Uh-huh.”
I listened to the caterpillars that weren’t ready for their last instar and then for something bigger out in the grove—an owl, say, or some coyotes. Coyotes make the worst demonic chorus you’ve ever heard when they’re closing in on some animal they’ve cornered—a house cat or a baby rabbit or a possum or somebody’s helpless lapdog. Right after we moved into this cottage, I opened the door to go to school and nearly stepped right in the mess of innards that a coyote left on the doormat: the liver, stomach, colon, and—grossest of all—severed head of a rat. Not even Robby would bury it for me. “If we were living in eastern Transylvania,” he said, “this would be an omen.”
I couldn’t hear an owl or any coyotes, though, just the caterpillars unsticking their sticky feet.
“Shouldn’t you go back to bed now?” I asked my mother.
“Pretty soon,” she said. The mug of Postum sat cold on her lap as she stared at the meditating caterpillar.
“Maybe you should get a puppy,” I said,